Silverlight 3 Released

Saturday July 11, 2009

Earlier than expected (by one day), Silverlight was released a couple of days ago. This is almost as significant a release in itself as Silverlight 2 was over the original Silverlight.That added C# and a CLR running on Mac as well as Windows. This release provides hardware graphic acceleration putting work on the GPU and lessening the load on your CPU. it also now includes support for H264, AAC audio and MP4.

Graphic support includes perspective 3D plus you can now manipulate bitmaps at the pixel level. Add to this 100 UI controls that can all be styled on top of a navigation framework that allows linking to content; useful for search engines. Most relevant is the Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Silverlight (If you have Visual Studio 2008) and the Silverlight Toolkit.

I think Silverlight 3 is now on a par with Flash or possibly even better than it technically and once you get over the learning curve is easier to develop for than Flash. That said, I think Microsoft need to produce a free Microsoft Visual Silverlight Express to encourage take up amongst part-time and recreation developers. There are a lot of C# developers who could produce wonderful stuff if there's an easier path. Maybe the next Visual C# Express will have it when Visual Studio 2010 comes out. If not, I think Microsoft will struggle to beat Flash in the games market.