What is Silverlight 5?

Silverlight 5 is a media plugin for Internet browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome which allows the web developers to enable rich media experience on their websites such as audio and video playback or small animations, text richness features, etc. on their websites. Silverlight is a similar application to that of Adobe Flash. Just like using Adobe Flash, you can view videos on major sites such as Youtube, Dailymotion etc., you will be able to view videos on any other site using silverlight 5 if that website has implemented silverlight for showing videos to the users. Not only it helps you to see videos on the web but it also helps the website developers to create websites which look good on the end user's screens. Fonts are displayed more clearly and the text can flow around for a more flexible layout of the page.

New Features of Microsoft Silverlight 5

There are about 40 new features in next version of Silverlight. These Silverlight 5 New Features would be witnessible upon Silverlight 5 release. These new features would be related to the subtopics I am going to enlist below.

Improved Media Features and User Interface Facilities

Hardware Decoding in Silverlight 5 - While most other media plugins would decode the video data on software, Silverlight 5 will do it on hardware. H.264 is a famous codec for presenting videos online because of the balance between the data transfer required for it and the hardware capabilities required for showing the video on the user screen. Silverlight 5 using the graphics processing unit or the graphics card (GPU) to decode the data for presentation. Since graphics processing units are built for the very purpose, it is usually very much faster than the software decoding. Also, decoding data on hardware takes a lot less energy when compared to decoding data in software. This means that using Silverlight 5, the battery of your notebook will last longer. Microsoft expects that using Silverlight 5 hardware decoding feature, even the low power netbooks will be able to play HD content.

Trickplay - The trick used in Trickplay is that you will be able to speed up or down the video while keeping the audio pitch correct. If you increase the speed of the video, the audio pitch will also increase making it difficult for you to hear the voice. Silverlight 5 avoids such situations by correcting the audio pitch while speeding up the video. This is very useful in those videos which are used for training purposes. You can speed up the trainer when he is doing some nonsense in the video and still keep the audio playback well enough to be heard and understood, thus saving time.

Improved power awareness - I am sure that if you have used any version of Microsoft Windows, you would have noticed that Windows Media Player will never allow the screen saver to come in when you are playing videos on it. This is great because you do not have to change the screen saver settings just for playing a video. This feature has now been embedded into Silverlight 5, so that when you are watching a long video over the web, in your Internet browser, your computer will not show the screensaver, just to annoy you. Also, like in Windows Media Player, the screen saver will pop in at the correct time, if the software is running but not playing a video to save the energy, Silverlight 5 will do the same. This means that when the video playback has ended, your Internet browser will inform the Windows Operating System that the video playback is now over and screen saver can be shown if needed. This power awareness improves both the user experience and the power usage.

Silverlight 5 Remote Control Support - I think I need not explain you this but just to inform you, let me tell you that Silverlight 5 will allow the media playback via Remote Control. If you are wondering about the use of such a feature, you might have noticed that most of the notebooks today in the market come with a small remote control for richer media experience. Windows will use the software driver controls used by those remote control devices to control the web media playback. This is significantly helpful when showing presentations and controlling the video without touching the device. Also, in cases when you enjoy a web video playlist, you can use the remote control in your hand to control the playback.

DRM (Digital Rights Management) - DRM (Digital Rights Management) in Siverlight 5 allows the web publishers to control the information flow on the Internet. DRM prevents the use of copyrighted information thus allowing a better control on media distribution. Digital Rights Management has been embedded in Silverlight 5 as well.

Business Application Features in Silverlight 5

Fluid user interface - In case you are unaware of what is a fluid user interface, a fluid UI is one which auto adjusts its elements according to the window size. So when you resize a window, the controls on the window will automatically adjust their position to make it look the best it can on that window size. Usually changing the size of the window will change the layout slowly. Silverlight 5 will allow this transition to happen in much smoother way, thus making the page look more professional.

Inter-Layout Transitions - When you need to change the elements in a window, transitions can be pretty rough depending on what you are changing. When you need to change a few elements rather than the complete interface, Silverlight 5 will allow your changes to happen in a smoother transition and the animation of it will make your application look more professional. The reordering, removal or addition of a new control, such as a button or a text-box will be smoother and more professional. This is one Silverlight 5 new feature which is expected by Microsoft to draw the attention of developers.

Improvements in Text - When the LCD screens came first time in the market, no one wanted to buy them for the simple reason that the text display was usually rough. The same applies to web applications. You would not like to use a web application which looks dirty. Silverlight 5 improves the text layout on the web application to make it more beautiful. Some of the improvements in Silverlight 5 regarding the text are as follows -

Multicolumn text can now flow around other elements to make a better layout.

You can now control how much each character is away from another character to allow the user to read clearly what has been written. Adding extra spaces between those characters which are less in the width according to the font allows a better read. This feature is one nice improvement.

Pixel Snapping is one feature which has been anticipated in this release by the developers. Pixel Snapping makes sure that the contents of one logical pixel does not affect the surrounding pixels. This means that whatever uses pixel snapping will be more clear than that which does not. When used in text, it improves the quality of text display to a great extent. With Silverlight 5, you will be able to enjoy that clarity.

Text layout performance has been improved that the text will be rendered faster than before.

Silverlight 5 will enhance the support for OpenType. If you do not know what is OpenType, let me tell you that OpenType is a microsoft specific technology built on top of TrueType allowing for scalable computer fonts, which allow for changing the size of a font without the need of rasterization.

Enhanced Application Presentation - One of the biggest Silverlight 5 new feature is the support of double click. In Adobe Flash player you cannot do a “double click”. A double click in that case would mean two subsequent single clicks, while Silverlight 5 can differentiate between single clicks and double clicks. This will allow the developers to present a control, which can do two works according to the click. If the user performs a single click, the control can do something and if the user double clicks the control, the same control will do something else. This redefines the way web applications work. Another improvement in the working style of Silverlight 5 application is the combobox type ahead feature. A combobox type ahead means that you can start typing the names of one of the options in a combobox and it will try to complete it automatically.

Networking and WCF in Silverlight 5

Silverlight 5 uses a background thread for networking and hence the network latency is reduced. If the previous sentence sounds Greek to you, just keep in mind that all it means is that the application will work faster over the Internet. Also, WS-Trust Support in Silverlight 5 means that content can be transferred in a secure way to a Silverlight 5 application. It will help the application developers relax as far as the security of data over the Internet is concerned because it is based on solid foundations of Windows operating system itself.

Graphics Improvements in Silverlight 5

Since Silverlight 5 is able to access the GPU or the graphics card on a client computer, it will be easy for an application developer to use silverlight 5 to create a 3D application using the 3D API of Silverlight 5. A 3D application usually improves the data visualization methods and provides a rich UI to the user. With the access to the GPU, all this will be much faster. Not only this, Silverlight 5 has immediate mode graphics API which allows the silverlight application to access the GPU and use it for rendering immediately as the data is available. In addition to all this, Microsoft has enable hardware acceleration in Silverlight 5 even in windowless mode as long as you are using Internet Explorer version 9. What windowless mode means is that it will render the content faster and there are less chance of hanging up the system.

Silverlight 5 Integration with Windows Operating System

Since Silverlight 5 is a Microsoft specific technology, you can use some advanced windows features such as the registry settings features, group policy, etc. in your Silverlight 5 application. For an example let us consider that you a developing a fairly complex application on Silverlight 5 which users will need help with when using. In such a case, you can develop fully fledged HTML pages as a part of the application containing help for the application itself. You can also use the trusted technologies to read and write from the users folders. You can also create buttons on the application itself to launch an application such as Microsoft Excel and show the content in your application in Microsoft Excel and allow the users to manipulate and save it on the computer; or open Microsoft Outlook for creation of an E-Mail. You will also be able to read and write files from removable media devices such as USB drives or barcode scanners, thus simplifying the access to data and enriching user experience.

Benefits of Silverlight 5

There are many benefits of Silverlight 5. I'd say that what are the benefits of Silverlight 5 are also sometimes the drawbacks of Silverlight 5. However, I'd like to mention that Silverlight 5 is integrated into Windows and the applications can use some of the advanced features of Windows Operating System.

Drawbacks of Silverlight 5

Just as always being a Microsoft product, it will not run on any platform except Windows. Some of the great features of Silverlight 5 which depend on the Windows OS are as follows -

Power Awareness

Pixel Snapping

DRM

Hardware Decoding

OpenType

Except these, Silverlight 5 is a great plugin for browsers specially for those websites which use Silverlight as a way to please the user.

Silverlight 5 Release Date

By far, the Silverlight 5 release date has not been actually exposed, however, it has been said by Microsoft that Silverlight 5 will be available by 2011 Q1. We are waiting for the Silverlight 5 Release definitely.

Download Silverlight 5 Beta

To Download Silverlight 5 Beta, you can use this link - Download Silverlight 5 Beta.

Thanks & Regards,

"Remember Me When You Raise Your Hand For Dua"
Raheel Ahmed Khan
System Engineer
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sirraheel@gmail.com

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