Finally Silverlight 5 Beta Is Available

Silverlight 5 continues the pace of rapid innovation, building on Silverlight 4's capabilities in the areas of rich applications and premium media experiences. With over 40 new features, the Silverlight 5 beta highlights dramatic video quality and performance improvements, as well as new capabilities that improve developer productivity

proved media support and rich UI capabilities:

Hardware Decode and presentation of H.264 improve performance for lower-power devices to render high-definition video using GPU support.

TrickPlay allows video to be played at different speeds and supports fast-forward and rewind. At up to twice the speed, audio pitch correction allows users to watch videos while preserving a

normal audio pitch.

Improved power awareness prevents the screen saver from being shown while watching video and allows the computer to sleep when video is not active.

Remote-control support allows users to control media playback.

Digital rights management advancements allow seamless switching between DRM media sources.

Building next-generation business applications:

Networking and Windows Communication Foundation enhancements:

Silverlight 5 performance improvements include:

Graphics improvements:

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerated 3-D application programming interface (API) provides rich graphics on the Web for building advanced data visualizations and rich user experience (UI).

Immediate mode graphics API allows direct rendering to the GPU.

Hardware acceleration is enabled in windowless mode with Internet Explorer 9.

Silverlight 5 extends features of the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser for the first time. These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks:

Host HTML content as a Web browser control within the Silverlight application. HTML pages, such as help content or e-mail, can be integrated within the application.

Read and write files to the user’s My Documents folder, making it easier to find media files or create local copies of reports.

Additional Silverlight 5 Features Included in this Beta

• Hardware video decode for H.264 playback.
• Multi‐core background JIT support for improved startup performance.
• ComboBox type ahead with text searching.
• Full keyboard support in full‐screen for trusted in‐browser applications, enables richer kiosk and
• media viewing applications in‐browser.
• Default filename in SaveFileDialog – Specify a default filename when you launch the SaveFileDialog.
• Unrestricted filesystem access – trusted applications can Read write to files in any directory on
• the filesystem.
• Improved Graphics stack – The graphics stack has been re‐architected to bring over
• improvements from WP7, such as Independent Animations.
• Performance optimizations –
• XAML Parser performance optimizations.
• Network Latency optimizations. Text layout performance improvements.
• Hardware acceleration is enabled in windowless mode with Internet Explorer 9.Silverlight 5 Features not included in this Beta
• The Beta is a step towards the final release of Silverlight 5. The full feature set planned for Silverlight 5
• was announced at the Firestarter event in December 2011 and also includes the following features not
• shipped in this Beta:
• Support for Postscript vector printing enables users to create reports and documents, including
• the ability to create a virtual print view different from what is shown on the screen.
• Improved power awareness prevents the screen saver from being shown while watching video and allows the computer to sleep when video is not active.
• Remote control support, allowing users to control media playback
• DRM advancements that allow seamless switching between DRM media sources.
• Enhanced OpenType support.
• Fluid user interface enables smoother animation within the UI. Inter‐Layout Transitions allow
• developers to specify animations to apply when elements are added, removed or re‐ordered
• within a layout. This provides smoother user experiences when, for example, items are inserted
• into a list.
• Text clarity is improved with Pixel Snapping.
• The DataContextChanged event is being introduced.
• WS‐Trust support: Security Assertion Markup Language authentication token.
• 64 bit support
• COM Interop for trusted applications running in‐browser.
• Calling unmanaged code using P/Invoke from trusted applications in and out of browser.
• The Pivot viewer control enables a visual way to rapidly sort through large collections of
• graphical data, for example a catalog of movies represented by images of dvd covers, using
• intuitive transitions to show the effects of filters on the result set

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