Silverlight has come to an age from WPF/E days and today 4.0 version was launched.
Features includes:
Support for enterprise applications:
Printing support: Silverlight application can print itself, how the content is formatted when printed, and determine the content that will appear. It even has capabilities to print a portion of the Silverlight content.
RichTextArea control / WebBrowser Control: The RichTextArea has Bi-Di support, allows hyperlinks, XAML content, and embedding of images. It also supports changing the font size, foreground color, and making text bold, italicized, and underlined as well as many other rich text features. The WebBrowser control displays HTML in the control when running Out-of-Browser
WCF RIA services: Exposes an object model on the server through an optimized .NET to .NET binary format as well as an open JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format to Silverlight application. WCF RIA Services has features to assist with change tracking on the client in Silverlight, user authentication, and personalization ( a la EDM change tracking system for integration with DB!!!)..
MEF suuport: Deploy application in multiple Silverlight applications (XAP) files. This allows the XAP files to be dynamically downloaded at runtime. MEF allows applications to be context-aware where the available parts change based on the state of the application. It also improves the general maintainability of Silverlight applications by greatly introduce loose coupling between its components.
InBuilt support for MVVM: Command Property on ButtonBase and Hyperlink
IDataErrorInfo, INotifyDataErrorInfo : Get errors when (data) bindings fails.
Auto-Sizing Columns and Copy from DataGrid
Navigation Page Loading Extensibility: introduces MVC-style navigation
Excellent data binding support through XAML code: Binding to String Indexers / SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath on the Selector / StringFormat, TargetNullValue, FallbackValue:
Databinding Support for Dependency Objects: Allows bind properties on a DependencyObject (DO) and not just on FrameworkElements.
CompositeTransform for animations:
ObservableCollection<T> Constructor Accepts IList and IEnumerable :
Inbuilt MouseWheel Support:
Right Mouse Click:
Programmatic Clipboard Access:
Webcam and Microphone Support:
Offline Digital Rights Management
Notifications (Toast)
File System Access / COM automation for trusted applications: If both return true and Microsoft Office is installed, you can create an instance of an object such as Microsoft Word
Cross-Domain Networking Access: An Out-of-Browser Trusted Application can perform cross-domain network calls.
It could NOT have been better than this… i wished i had all these features for a silverlight application(currently in SL3) i am involved in and SL team has delivered!!
Will be blogging more on these once a have more time…
Subodh Pushpak's Blog 