14 DAY TRIAL // The wait is over for the next iteration of Silverlight, well, almost over. Having already confirmed that it would release Silverlight 4 to web by the end of this week, Microsoft revealed that the final bits would be made available for download this Thursday. While on stage at the official Silverlight 4 launch event in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 13, 2010, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, .NET Developer Platform, indicated that Microsoft had wrapped up the successor of Silverlight 3. Just a day earlier, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 had been released to manufacturing, and offered to customers worldwide. The software giant is now pushing on with its big week for developers with the release of Silverlight 4 RTW.
“So when is everything shipping? We started the Silverlight 4.0 process in November at our PDC conference when we shipped the first beta of it,” Guthrie stated. “We shipped the release candidate here in Vegas, actually, last month at our MIX conference. And we're excited to announce that we're shipping the final release of it this week. You'll be able to download the final Silverlight 4.0 bits along with the Visual Studio 2010 tooling support for those bits starting this Thursday, April 15. And basically, everything you've seen here today, all of the scenarios that we've walked through, you'll be able to take advantage of, you'll be able to build these exact same applications, and you'll be able to start deploying them to your customers.”
Silverlight 4 brings to the table a variety of features designed to streamline development of RIA projects, but also to support rich experiences for users. Silverlight 4 is ultimately only a piece of the Microsoft Cloud puzzle, and it needs to be used in conjunction with additional technology from the company. While features such as Deep Zoom, Media Format extensibility, Perspective 3D Graphics, Pixel Shader Effects, Out of Browser support, etc., require only the plugin, for IIS Smooth Streaming, devs need to also tap Windows Server and IIS.
“We've added a lot of great features with Silverlight 4.0, enabled a bunch of new capabilities. We've also been very focused with this release on the fundamentals in terms of quality and performance,” Guthrie explained. “We've also focused on startup, and with this release, we're about 30 percent faster to startup when you first launch an application while making it really responsive. We're also adding new profiling APIs so that you can use profilers like Visual Studio or other tools to be able to monitor your applications, identify hot spots and easily fix them.”
Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.
Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (RC) Build 4.0.50303.0 is available for download here.