Today I discovered this page about the upcoming Silverlight 3.0 and I was really surprised about the ton of new features they are adding in this new release. In fact, reading at the features list it confusing me… it seems to me like I was reading a page with the flash player capabilities.. more or less.
If SIlverlight 2.0 was comparable, more or less to flash 5, I believe ( but I should test it before ) that this new version has quite all the features of flash 10.
- Support for Higher Quality
- Live and on-demand true HD
- Perspective 3D Graphics
- Pixel Shader effects
- Bitmap Caching
- New Bitmap API
- Themed application support
- Improved text rendering & font support
- Deep Linking
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Element to Element binding
- Application library caching
- Binary XML allows communication
- Local Connection
- Out of Browser Capabilities
Moreover, dont forget, Silverlight has a couple of advantages above flash: a more powerful vector rendering engine and threads capabilities.
Read the full article here: http://silverlight.net/themes/silverlight/getstarted/sl3beta.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1#whatsnew
P.S. …just because I continued following links around MS pages I also came across a new feature microsoft will add to C#, one of those features I always envy to python: the named arguments. I really find it useful, instead of writing twenty null arguments ( like when you create a textformat… ) you simply call arguments by name.