Microsoft steams ahead with Silverlight 3

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 19 Mar 2009 at 11:50

Microsoft has released the beta of Silverlight 3, as it battles to knock Adobe's Flash off its throne.

Silverlight 3 brings a slew of important new features intended to tempt developers to the platform, and arrives only four months after Silverlight 2.

Principal among these is support for hardware-based graphics acceleration, and new codec support for H.264, AAC audio and MPEG-4. There's also a raft of new APIs allowing developers to plug in their own codecs.

This new hardware support brings with it the ability to convert images into three dimensions, upgrades for the impressive DeepZoom technology and new pixel shader effects.

Other nifty additions include the ability to run Silverlight 3 outside the browser using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which will allow app developers to create Silverlight-based desktop apps.

This is aided and abetted by the ability to work offline and download content to cache. Support for multi-touch applications has also been added.

Microsoft says it's only planning a single beta of Silverlight 3 and is aiming for a full release "later this year."