Silverlight Makes Version 3 at MIX '09

Here we are at MIX '09, and like the past couple of MIX events, Silverlight, this time v3, has taken center-stage, and is promising to be a great platform for developing Rich Internet Applications, as well as now, the typical Line of Business Apps to power both consumer experiences and work experiences. It is often cited that Microsoft gets it in v3. V3 is an important milestone, and it certainly is for Silverlight.

Indeed Silverlight which started out by focusing on being a scriptable graphics and media runtime in v1, and incorporated the CLR, controls, and a nice subset of managed code framework in v2 is growing up in v3 to become a full-fledged application platform. Several new features were highlighted during the keynote today:

• New Graphics and Media Capabilities - GPU support, perspective transforms, pixel shader effects, media smooth streaming, new codecs, including ability to write your own, better text rendering, etc.
• Data - new data controls, data-binding improvements, and validation
• Application model - ability to use library cache for reducing xap package sizes, better styling, capabilities
• Out-of-browser - ability to write apps that escape the browser chrome, run offline, and across platforms.
• Networking - besides offline/online notifications, support for binary serialization, server push and local connections (for communication across silverlight apps)

All this and more. Even better, Silverlight 3 is a tad bit smaller in size than Silverlight 2. I think Silverlight 3 is pretty much a no-brainer choice for developing a whole new set of experiences on the Web.

Other interesting stuff included tooling for creating Silverlight apps on the Mac using Eclipse as the IDE. The other big interesting announcement was around SketchFlow, an exciting new addition to the Expression line centered around sketching, prototyping, collecting feedback, and the coolest part - the ability to transform some of your early work into an start for the real application.

Finally, there was even a peek at what lies ahead in the progression - application frameworks that span multiple tiers, and deriving productivity and simplicity for building data-driven RIAs and LOB apps from .NET on the client and .NET on the server... the stuff I work on. :-)

We just released the first public CTP of .NET RIA Services formerly codenamed Alexandria, along with a basic first walkthrough of using it. I'll be blogging a lot more in the days and months to come, starting with more about my MIX talk, which is later in the day (T41F), so stay tuned. Its good to be able to finally talk about what you're working on :-)