Silverlight 4 beta released!

Silverlight 4 beta was announced by Scott Guthrie a few minutes ago during his keynote at PDC 2009.

So only 4 months after Silverlight 3 released, we have a new version to play with!!

Silverlight 4 brings several interesting features:

• Webcam/mic support
• Printing API
• MouseWheel on common controls
• Implicit Styles
• Controls: RichTextBox, ViewBox and WebBrowser
• DataBinding improved
• CLR 4.0 (compatibility with dll from the Full .NET 4.0)
• and much much more!!!… see full list below

Notice that from the top 10 features request list, 8 out of 10 were addressed, that’s awesome!!!

Silverlight gain maturity for business applications with additions like Printing, MouseWheel, Clipboard, Right click and File Drop.

Several tools have been updated to support Silverlight 4 beta development:

• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010
• Expression Blend for .NET 4 Preview
• Silverlight Toolkit
• WCF RIA Services (new name for .NET RIA Services)

Detailed list of Silverlight 4 new features:

• WebCam/Microphone
• Printing Support
• Media
  • WMS Multicast Support
  • H.264 Mp4 Playback Protected by PlayReady DRM
  • Offline DRM
  • Output Protection
• Text
  • RichTextBox control
  • Bidi Support (including Arabic and Hebrew Text)
  • UIElement.TextInput event
  • IME Improvements for TextBox
• Controls
  • Implicit Styles (type based style theming – no longer a need to explicitly set styles on controls)
  • Built-in MouseWheel Support on ScrollViewer, TextBox, ComboBox, Calendar, DatePicker
  • ViewBox
  • ICommanding Support with ButtonBase & Hyperlink
  • SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath Properties on DropDownLists
  • RTL Layout via UIElement.FlowDirection property
  • VisualStateGroup.CurrentStateGroup property
• DataBinding
  • DataBinding Support for DependencyObjects
  • IDataErrorInfo Support
  • StringFormat, TargetNullValue & FallBackValue Properties on Binding
  • ObservableCollection<T> ctor that takes INumerable or Ilist
• Networking
• UDPListener and Multi-cast support
• Memory Usage Fix During Progressive Downloads
• Automatically Adding Referer Header
• Astoria 2.0 Support
• WCF RIA Services
• WCF Improvements
• Out of Browser Applications
  • HTML Hosting Support
  • Windowing APIs (resize window, etc)
  • Notifications (Outlook-like popup windows that can display even when OOB app is minimized)
  • Elevated Privileges Support
    • Cross Domain Networking Access
    • Full file path from Open/SaveFileDialog and File Manipulation APIs
    • No User-Initiation Requirement for Full Screen, Open/SaveFileDialogs
    • COM interop (allowing you to create and use any COM object on Windows)
• CLR 4.0  Engine
  • NGEN Support for Core Runtime Binaries (faster startup and execution of apps)
  • Dynamic keyword support in C# 4.0 and COM interop when running elevated out of browser applications
  • MEF – Managed Extensibility Framework
  • Binary assembly compat between assemblies that run on SL and on full .NET 4.0 CLR (no recompile needed now starting with .NET 4 Beta2)