Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (RC) Downloads at MIX10, RTM in April

Last Updated on Monday, 15 March 2010 01:38 Written by Mire_B Monday, 15 March 2010 01:28

Scott Guthrie, vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division, announced the first and only Release Candidate (RC) for Silverlight 4 at MIX10. Downloads of Silverlight 4 RC are planned to go live today, and Microsoft is pushing ahead with the development process to finalize the release. Guthrie promised that Silverlight 4 RTM will be released to web next month, in April 2010.

From Microsoft: Silverlight 4 delivers a full suite of powerful capabilities to business application developers, bringing the best-of-breed .NET platform to browser-based experiences. Silverlight provides an ideal platform for developing and deploying modern business applications for both customer facing and staff-facing applications.

* Business Application Development. Silverlight 4 consolidates its position as the natural choice for building business applications on the Web.

New Features for Application Developers:

o Comprehensive printing support enabling hardcopy reports and documents as well as a virtual print view, independent of screen content.

o A full set of forms controls with over 60 customizable, styleable components. New controls include RichTextbox with hyperlinks, images and editing and Masked textbox for complex field validation. Enhanced controls include DataGrid with sortable/resizeable columns and copy/paste rows.

o WCF RIA Services introduces enterprise class networking and data access for building n-tier applications including transactions, paging of data, WCF and HTTP enhancements.

o Localization enhancements with Bi-Directional text, Right-to-Left support and complex scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and Thai and 30 new languages.

o The .NET Common Runtime (CLR) now enables the same compiled code to be run on the desktop and Silverlight without change.

o Enhanced databinding support increases flexibility and productivity through data grouping/editing and string formatting within bindings.

o Managed Extensibility Framework now supports building large composite applications.

o Exclusive tooling support for Silverlight, new in Visual Studio 2010. Including a full editable design surface, drag and drop data-binding, automatically bound controls, datasource selection, integration with Expression Blend styling resources, Silverlight project support and full intellisense.