Yesterday at their Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, California Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 4. 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.
Silverlight 4 introduces additional capabilities to enable creation of ever more rich, appealing high-performance interactive experiences and innovative media experiences:
Fluid interface enhancements advance application usability through animation effects.
Webcam and microphone to allow sharing of video and audio for instance for chat or customer service applications.
Audio and video local recording capabilities capture RAW video without requiring server interaction, enabling a wide range of end-user interaction and communication scenarios for example video conferencing.
Bring data in to your application with features such as copy and paste or drag and drop.
Long lists can now be scrolled effortlessly with the mouse wheel.
Support conventional desktop interaction models through new features such as right-click context menu.
Support for Google’s Chrome browser.
Performance optimizations mean Silverlight 4 applications start quicker and run 200% faster than the equivalent Silverlight 3 application.
Deep Zoom enhancements include hardware acceleration to support larger datasets and faster animation.
Multi-touch support enables a range of gestures and touch interactions to be integrated into user experiences.
Multicast networking, enabling Enterprises to lower the cost of streaming broadcast events such as company meetings and training, interoperating seamlessly with existing Windows Media Server streaming infrastructure.
Content protection for H.264 media through Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady.
Output protection for audio/video streams allowing content owners or distributors to ensure protected content is only viewed through a secure video connection.
As a Silverlight developer, I am excited about a lot of these features that are coming with Silverlight 4. If you haven’t had a chance to get the Silverlight 4 beta tools, you can do so by going to the following link:
Yesterday at their Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, California Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 4. 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. 
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