Highlighted Features & Improvements In Silverlight 5

While I am watching the live streaming of the much awaited Silverlight Fire Starter, I decided to write on the new interesting and highlighted features of the upcoming Silverlight 5 as pointed out by Scott Guthrie.

Highlighted New Features

• Hardware Decode: All the media streamed in Silverlight can now take advantage of GPU power. Instead of putting the pressure on the CPU, all the media which runs on Silverlight can now use the GPU for better performance.
• Trick Play : Medias will now have a new provision called "Trick Play". Now what's this? Well this comes with a bunch of features like pitch change, play speed change and other video / audio tunings which is trivial for any media applications.
• Power Management: It's always annoying when you watch a video online and you have to keep your screen saver hiding every time it pops up. Along with other power management features to improve your battery life / power savings, the new feature automatically disables the screen saver when the media is played and resume when it is paused or stopped.
• Remote Desktop: Yeah, you heard it correct. Now you will be able to remote any desktop over web without the need of any extra software installed in your machine. All you need is a browser which supports Silverlight.
• Immediate Graphics API: Developing your animation or Silverlight application on 3D and take the advantage of the GPU.

Improvements

• WS - Trust support is now available for RIA services.
• RIA services is now extended to Azure and I would be glad now to have my Silverlight showing your Azure features & data.
• MVVM friendly datasource is now available and therefore you don't have to write your custom code for complicated datasources.
• The best and wonderful improvement is now you can set breakpoints in the XAML. This BIG feature will now not make you hate all your page in XAML. Now what? Forget the code behind.
• Out of browser applications can be now multi window.
• Unmanaged DLL can be called by Silverlight. Therefore now you can call a win 32 application from the Silverlight.
• Vector printing is now available which will help the Silverlight to instruct the printer in a better way to produce a hard copy as good as you see in the screen.
• Automated UI testing is now available. You can record by just starting the record and the Visual Studio will generate the code for you which can be simulated / replayed at any point of time.
• Also profiling the Silverlight application is available and so now you can check your application performance.

What I tell you for now is that, "This is not it"; we will have more surprises when the Silverlight 5 launches and also remember that I haven't mentioned all the features showcased. Silverlight 5 beta will hit the market by Spring 2011 and the RTM by Winter 2011.