Silverlight 3.0 is slated for release towards the end of this year; however a beta is available for download now that has all the flashy streaming media controls shown in the many demos. NetFlix showed off the adaptive streaming/buffering capabilities of the media control. There are over 100 Silverlight 3.0 controls and a slew of improvements including – hardware acceleration, 3D support, Deep Zoom, Multi-touch, Library caching, Style Inheritance, data binding to name a few. There was also a great deal of emphasis of SEO (search engine optimization) throughout the conference.
The Expression suites of products (Web, Blend etc) are primarily UI designer tools. Expression Blend 3 has a nice new component called SketchFlow that allows you take a static (such as a Photoshop) image and build an animated UI prototype from it (without any code) that can be shipped to customers who can then mark their comments and send it back to the developer. The entire design can then be exported to a word document. Pretty cool tool, available as a free download.
Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview feature allows developers to quickly compare how a page is rendered in different browsers at the same time. Great thing is it allows one to test all on a single box – IE 6, 7 and 8 markup differences (without VMs). Also available as a free, download (beta).
Silverlight 3.0 applications can now run outside the browser. The out of browser applications run sandboxed, and has built in auto-update support i.e. once deployed are automatically updated from the web server.
