What’s New in Silverlight 3?

Silverlight 3, though it is in beta stage, but it came up with lots of new features. Some of them are mentioned below:

• Silverlight 3 now supports H.264 video formats & AAC audio formats. Now it also supports RAW audio/video pipeline
• It now supports GPU Acceleration by adding a parameter (EnableGPUAcceleration = "true") in the Silverlight object
• It now supports 3D functionalities. You can now add Perspective view to the element level
• Various Effects has been introduced in Silverlight 3 using Pixel Shader API (e.g. Blur, DropShadow etc)
• Various Animations (like: bouncing, transition) are now part of the Silverlight 3
• A user can start a Silverlight out-of-browser "application" either by right-clicking on the Silverlight element or by clicking on a button within the application itself
• Silverlight now supports custom dialogs. By using the SaveFileDialog you can now write contents outside the sandbox
• It now supports local messaging across multiple silverlight plugins
• XAP compression has been improved
• Lots of new controls (like: DockPanel, WrapPanel, Label, ViewBox, TreeView, ExpanderControl, AutoCompleteBox) were added in this version. New controls in the Silverlight Toolkit are also available
• DataPagination has been added in Silverlight 3
• Using NavigationFramework you can now navigate to different view of the application. You can now integrate the browser back/forward functionalities with this framework
• Binding of elements are now available by which you can update the UI without any code. Data validation in binding is also available in this release
• AssemblyCaching is now available by which you can download the external assemblies only once & later you can use them from the cache. This will improve the application load time during next load
• In Silverlight 3 Network monitoring API has been introduced, by which you can check whether the application is connected to the network or not
• Now binary XML format is also supported in addition to the text XML which will improve the performance in the messaging area

Cheers :)