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Microsoft today unveiled the next iteration of its Silverlight technology, Silverlight 5, which the company said will improve things like media playback and the time it takes to develop applications.
"There's been a lot of angst on this topic in the last few weeks," Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president for Microsoft's developer division told attendees of the company's Silverlight-focused Firestarter event at its headquarters. "Let me pause and say there's a future for Silverlight, and it's going to be a bright one."
Questions arose as to Microsoft's commitment to Silverlight development back in late-October at the annual Professional Developers Conference, where there was little talk of the runtime. Instead, a sizable focus of the keynote went over how the company was building in faster, and more robust HTML5 compatibilities into Internet Explorer. Microsoft quickly responded to concerns by saying that the technology was still a very important part of the company's development efforts, and later offered up a free, Silverlight-focused Firestarter event as "an extra day of PDC."
Guthrie explained that while Microsoft was focusing heavily on HTML5, it was just one piece of the developer puzzle, and that technologies like Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) made up a technology portfolio. "Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses," Guthrie said. "The flexibility of having each of these is a strength of this platform."
As for what's next for Silverlight, Guthrie detailed some of the new features of coming to version 5, which had been requested by users and developers alike on an idea submission and voting page the company had put up. Guthrie said that more than 21,000 votes had been cast, and that the company had gotten to about 70 percent of those voted-on items into Silverlight 5.
New to Silverlight 5 will be extended support for high definition video content, with support for hardware video decoding. This offloads some of the processing power for decoding an HD movie from the CPU to the GPU. Guthrie promised that this would let end users stream 1080p video on something like a Netbook, as well as save battery life along the way. Silverlight 5 will also include a playback tool called Trickplay, which adds variable speed playback to audio and video. This will let users speed up or slow down the media they're ingesting without affecting things like pitch.
One of Silveright 5's new media features is Trickplay, which lets users adjust the speed of audio and video without affecting pitch.
(Credit:Microsoft)
Other media tweaks include support for remote controls, as well as a new power management feature that can tell when you're watching a video, so it won't let the screensaver turn on. The feature also works the other way, so if you've paused something you're watching, it now knows, and can re-enable your power saving settings.
As for improvements to what developers can do with their applications, Silverlight 5 adds support for low-latency networking, which Guthrie explained as being important for applications such as stock trackers, where data may be needed in real-time. Version 5 also adds support for data binding debugging, which Guthrie said should speed up bug hunting on large and complex code structures.
More to come...
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"There's been a lot of angst on this topic in the last few weeks," Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president for Microsoft's developer division told attendees of the company's Silverlight-focused Firestarter event at its headquarters. "Let me pause and say there's a future for Silverlight, and it's going to be a bright one."
Questions arose as to Microsoft's commitment to Silverlight development back in late-October at the annual Professional Developers Conference, where there was little talk of the runtime. Instead, a sizable focus of the keynote went over how the company was building in faster, and more robust HTML5 compatibilities into Internet Explorer. Microsoft quickly responded to concerns by saying that the technology was still a very important part of the company's development efforts, and later offered up a free, Silverlight-focused Firestarter event as "an extra day of PDC."
Guthrie explained that while Microsoft was focusing heavily on HTML5, it was just one piece of the developer puzzle, and that technologies like Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) made up a technology portfolio. "Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses," Guthrie said. "The flexibility of having each of these is a strength of this platform."
As for what's next for Silverlight, Guthrie detailed some of the new features of coming to version 5, which had been requested by users and developers alike on an idea submission and voting page the company had put up. Guthrie said that more than 21,000 votes had been cast, and that the company had gotten to about 70 percent of those voted-on items into Silverlight 5.
New to Silverlight 5 will be extended support for high definition video content, with support for hardware video decoding. This offloads some of the processing power for decoding an HD movie from the CPU to the GPU. Guthrie promised that this would let end users stream 1080p video on something like a Netbook, as well as save battery life along the way. Silverlight 5 will also include a playback tool called Trickplay, which adds variable speed playback to audio and video. This will let users speed up or slow down the media they're ingesting without affecting things like pitch.
One of Silveright 5's new media features is Trickplay, which lets users adjust the speed of audio and video without affecting pitch.(Credit:Microsoft)
Other media tweaks include support for remote controls, as well as a new power management feature that can tell when you're watching a video, so it won't let the screensaver turn on. The feature also works the other way, so if you've paused something you're watching, it now knows, and can re-enable your power saving settings.
As for improvements to what developers can do with their applications, Silverlight 5 adds support for low-latency networking, which Guthrie explained as being important for applications such as stock trackers, where data may be needed in real-time. Version 5 also adds support for data binding debugging, which Guthrie said should speed up bug hunting on large and complex code structures.
More to come...
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