The new version of "Flash contender" has been released...

Today the Silverlight 3 RTW* has been released. In my very limited knowledge… I dunno whether there was a RC version before or not. Since all that I know the last previous version was beta… but who cares… this new version of “flash contender” has been released anyway :P
The run time can be downloaded via this link.

And the overview...

The new features description can be found in this link.

There are some features that exciting for me, those features are GPU support, 3D support, 3. Out of browser capabilities and new bitmap manipulation API.

Regarding those the new features, these are some comment that pop up from my head, but please be aware that due to my limited knowledge and I haven’t try this feature my self so better not use it for reverence hehehe…

1. GPU support - for faster video and bitmap rendering…


2. Perspective 3D support - yes… finally the “real 3D” support! not just a 2D vector that looks like 3D. So for those who previously were expecting to implement 3D in this Silverlight world… it’s time to bring it on dude! Hehehe…


3. Out of browser capabilities - if you think that this feature will kill the WPF application… in my opinion it won’t… well at least for now. The features of this Silverlight version are still very… very… very… limited compared to the WPF desktop application. One of the simple example is that there is no printing/reporting support on this Silverlight application. Another silly analogy to explain this is, from the size of the framework. This Silverlight 3 run time is only around 4MB. Which is very small compared to the .NET 3.0 framework, although it is combined with the other Microsoft foundation (WCF and WF) so I personally don’t know the size of the WPF framework itself. So this second analogy is not very relevant :)


4. New bitmap manipulation API - I personally quite glad hearing this feature. Since it will certainly ease my pet project :P


5. For the other features… you can see it for yourself from the given link… :P

However… without any intention to devastate the excitement, there are some (basic) features that are not included in this release. Some of those features are right click and mouse scrolling button support and also the printing/reporting support. From my point of view, for the right click and scrolling is really essential for today application. For the printing/reporting support is also essential especially when we want to build business application or even enterprise level application.
Therefore I would like to ask you guys to support by asking this features to the wish list in the Silverlight official forum.

In case if you want to develop Silverlight 3 application you can download the SDK from this link.

*RTW stands for Released To Web in case you’re not geeky enough… :P