Microsoft Silverlight 5 Release Candidate Appears

Microsoft has delivered a release candidate (RC) of Silverlight 5, the company’s tool for creating and delivering rich Internet applications and media experiences on the Web.

In a blog post, Pete Brown, lead of the Developer Guidance Community Team at Microsoft, said the Silverlight 5 RC is now available as a developer-only release that is aimed at getting them ready for the final release later this year.

There is no Go-Live licence for the RC. The Silverlight 5 RC can be downloaded here.

Brown said that, in addition to what Microsoft had in the beta, some of the more exciting features included in this release are:

• 64-bit support
• Vector (Postscript) Printing
• Remote Control and Media Command Support
• DataContextChanged event
• In-Browser Trusted Applications
• Power awareness for media apps (keep the PC alive while a movie is playing, for example)
• PivotViewer Control
• P/Invoke support for calling native functions

Internal Changes And Improved Features

Microsoft made several changes to the locations of some of the XNA namespaces and files, Brown added.

“For example, you’ll find that much of the 3D stuff has moved to a different DLL,” he said. “We’ve also changed the Linked Text feature to use the read-only RichTextBlock rather than the editable RichTextBox. I’ve updated both posts and their downloadable source code to reflect the changes.”

Silverlight 5 builds on the foundation of Silverlight 4 for creating business applications and rich media experiences. Among other capabilities, the Silverlight 5 RC delivers video-quality and performance improvements, plus features that improve developer productivity.

Silverlight 5 also has improved media support and rich user interface (UI) capabilities, such as Hardware Decode and presentation of H.264 to 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.

Silverlight 5’s 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, Microsoft said.

Performance improvements include: reduced network latency by using a background thread for networking; XAML parser improvements that speed up startup and runtime performance; and reduced network latency by using a background thread for networking. Silverlight tools improvements include Microsoft Visual Studio profiling support including CPU, memory, thread contention, and Visual Studio Team Test support.