Silverlight 2 beta 2: cross domain connections, more controls, and animation

Microsoft launched Silverlight 2 beta 2 last Friday (which seemed a bit strange….).

I saw this on the same day as some Adobe folks showed me an old thread that showed MLB.tv sneaking a context menu saying “About Silverlight” into the Flash version ;)

What is new in the latest beta? Danny Thorpe is looking forward to digging into the “new support for cross-domain connections using sockets, sibling to Silverlight’s existing cross-domain HTTP request.”

Full Feature List

• Animation
  1. Support for animating custom data points
  2. Object Animation support (animating structs)
• Deep Zoom
  1. New XML-based file format
  2. MultiScaleTileSource to wire up your own images and get the Deep Zoom experience
  3. Better notifications when sub-images enter the view
• Controls
  1. Customize the look and feel of controls using Visual State Manager. Interactive control templates were never so easy.
  2. Some base controls are now part of the core platform, rather than packaged into apps. Say hello to smaller app sizes.
  3. Calendar now supports multi-selection and blackout dates
  4. New TabControl
  5. Control properties changes (Background, Tooltip, FontFamily, FontSize…)
  6. DataGrid improvements: auto size, reorder, sort, performance and more
• TextBox
  1. IME Level 3 input support
  2. Text wrapping and multiline selection highlighting in textbox
  3. Scrolling and clipboard support
  4. Document level navigation keys
• Improvements in error handling, reporting
• Parser and Property system
  1. DependencyProperty.Register/RegisterAttached now supports PropertyMetadata
  2. New DependencyObject.ClearValue
  3. Visual tree helper
• Data-binding
  1. Per binding level validation
  2. Support for element syntax for binding markup extensions
  3. Binding to attached properties
  4. ItemsControl extensibility (OnItemsChanged method)
  5. Fallback in value conversion (Binding.UnsetValue)
• Input
  1. Support for limited keyboard input in Full Screen mode (arrow, tab, enter, home, end, pageup/pagedown, space). I’ve seen more than a few requests for this on the forums.
  2. Managed APIs for Inking and stylus input
• Networking and Data
  1. Cross Domain support in Sockets
  2. Cross Domain security enhancements
  3. HttpWebRequest and WebClient callable from background threads
  4. Upload support in WebClient
  5. Isolated Storage: default size increased to 1MB and new ability to change quota with user consent. Also a new management UI.
  6. Duplex communications ("push" from server to Silverlight client with no need to "poll" for data)
  7. LINQ -to- JSON serialization
  8. Significantly improved SOAP interop
  9. "Add New Item" template in Visual Studio for "Silverlight-enabled WCF Service"
  10. ADO.NET Data Services support
• UIAutomation and Accessibility support in the platform
• Media
  1. Platform support for Adaptive Streaming (also referred to by people as multi bitrate), the ability for Silverlight to switch between media depending on network and CPU conditions
  2. Content protection with PlayReady DRM and Windows DRM
  3. Basic server-side playlist (SSPL) support
• Localization
  1. Changes to localized application model. You now create one xap per locale, instead of one monolithic multilingual app
  2. Expanded localization languages of runtime and SDK
  3. Japanese SDK Installer and documentation (July 10)
• Several changes to make API and behavior more compatible with WPF
• Tools
  1. Beta 1 projects will be automatically ported to Beta 2
  2. Remote debugging for VB on the Mac
• CLR
  1. A new developer-oriented runtime package with debugging binaries, localized strings, docs etc.
  2. Support for OS fallback logic for resources
  3. CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture isolation to AppDomain level
• DLR
  1. Performance improvements
  2. Various new DLR and IronPython 2.0 Beta 2 language features
  3. Various new IronRuby features