New Functions of Silverlight 2 beta2

Document directory

• Networking Improvement
• Data Improvement
• Understand compatibility with Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2 beta 1

Beta2 adds many new features (more details are shown below), but the download size is only 4.6mb. It takes less than 10 seconds to install it on the machine. NET framework or any other software can work, and all functions can work across browsers on Mac and Windows machines. These functions will be provided by moonlight 2 in Linux.

Silverlight 2 beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between beta2 and the final version, so you should expect the applications you write with beta2 to be updated when the final version is released. But we think these changes will be straightforward and easy. Now you can plan and start developing business projects.

You can use Silverlight vs 2008 and expression blend 2.5 to develop the Silverlight beta2 application in July, the Silverlight vs 2008 tool works in vs 2008 and recently released vs 2008 SP1 beta.

Improvements in Ui and controls

More built-in controls

The core Silverlight installation of Beta 1 only contains several controls. The most common controls (including buttons, ListBox, and slider) are released in other programs, you need to bundle and publish these sets in the application (the result is that the download size of the application is increased ). As part of the core Silverlight 2 download, beta 2 will now install more than 30 most commonly used controls, which means that you can now develop Silverlight 2 applications that use these core controls, the download size can be as large as 3 kb, which makes the download size of the Silverlight application very small and enables the application to start very quickly.

In addition to the core controls included in the basic Silverlight 2 installation, this week we will release other high-level controls implemented in another assembly, which you can reference and include in the application. This includes items such as DataGrid (the new features of beta2 are shown below), calendar (supported by multi-day selection and no-selectable date in beta2), and tabpanel (new control only available in beta2) such controls.

Control template editing support

One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming models is their ability to fully customize the view of controls, which allows developers and designers to refine the control UI in a subtle and dramatic way, it facilitates great flexibility. This week's expression blend 2.5 preview version now supports the designer for editing the control template, which will help you quickly changeAny widgetYou do not have to bend over to modify the XAML source code.

Support for visual State Manager (VSM-Visual State Manager)

The control templates in Silverlight and WPF support the "look" and "feel" customization of the control. "Feel" means changing the interaction responsiveness. For example, when you press, get the focus, lose the focus, press, and disabled, there is something in the selected ..., how it reacts. Often, when users interact with controls like this, you need to execute animation effects.

One of the new things we introduced in Silverlight 2 beta2 is "visual State Manager" (VSM), which greatly facilitates you to build interactive control templates. VSM introduces two basic concepts you can use in the control template: "visual States" and "state transitions )". For example, a widget like a button defines multiple visual states for itself: "normal (normal)", "Mouseover (under the mouse)", "pressed (pressed )", "disabled (unavailable)", "focused (getting focus)", "unfocused (not focused )". In the template editing mode in blend, the designer can now easily edit the appearance of a button in each specific status, and set the migration rules to control the time when the animation effect should run when migrating from one status to another. At runtime, Silverlight dynamically runs the appropriate animated storyboard to smoothly transition the control from one state to another.

What's amazing about this model is that the designerNoWrite code,NoCreate an animated storyboard manually.NoIt is very efficient to understand the object model of the control. This makes it easy to learn the curves for creating interactive control templates, which means that existing artists can easily participate in the Silverlight project. Later this year, we will also add "visual State Manager" (VSM) Support to WPF, so that you can use the same method in Windows applications, and share the control template between the WPF and Silverlight projects.

Textbox

Beta2 includes some significant improvements to the built-in textbox editing controls. It now supports text scrolling with line breaks, multi-Line Text Selection, and document navigation keys, and copy/paste the clipboard. Beta2 now also supports IME Level 3 input for non-western character sets (including candidate window selection ):

Input support

Beta2 adds additional keyboard support (arrow keys, tab, press enter, home, end, Previous Page/next page, Space key) in full screen mode ). Note: To avoid password spoofing, complete keyboard input is not supported currently. Beta2 also adds a new APIs that supports Ink Printing and stroke input.

Ui automation and accessibility)

Beta2 adds UI automation framework support in Silverlight. UI automation (UIA) allows screen readers and other auxiliary tools to identify and interact with components that constitute your Silverlight 2 application. Beta2 uses the UIA framework to add UIA-based behavior to a set of Silverlight controls. In the final version of Silverlight 2, all controls are built in with UIA-based behavior. We will also support high-contrast scenarios. These features allow you to build accessible, Section 508-compatible applications. This UIA support will also facilitate automated UI testing of applications.

Animation and graphics system animation and Graphics System

Beta2 adds animation support for custom dependency attributes, and now supports object animation (animation effect on struct ). Beta2 also supports creating a storyboard in the code to animation some of the display trees, instead of adding the storyboard to the display tree (allowing you to embed the animation effect completely in the Code ), the callback support for each frame of the animation will be added to the final version.

Beta2 contains a new visual tree static helper class that provides an advanced visual Tree View APIs. It provides the ability to enumerate child elements of an element to obtain the ancestor/parent element of a given reference element. These APIs operations can be performed on any uielement object that you pass.

Deepzoom

Beta2 now supports manifest files in the XML-based deepzoom set, beta2 also added extensible multiscaletilesource support to deepzoom (allowing developers to connect to an image set of an existing pyramid structure that is not consistent with the format used for deep zoom high-performance display ).

WPF compatibility

Silverlight beta2 contains many defect fixes/modifications to improve API compatibility between Silverlight and WPF (note: the final version of Silverlight will also include some additional compatibility work ). We will add some new APIs introduced in Silverlight 2 to WPF in. Net 3.5 SP1 this summer.

Multimedia improvements

Adaptive streaming)

Beta2 supports adaptive streaming, which allows you to encode media at multiple bit rates, then, the Silverlight application dynamically switches between them based on network and CPU conditions.

This will lead to an extremely rich end-user media experience, because it creates such a possibility that the content provider will simultaneously provide low-end and high-end bit rate versions of the video, silverlight selects the optimal version based on the hardware and network capacity of end users. If the machine or network conditions change during video watching, Silverlight can automatically switch to a more appropriate bit rate without any caching or medium-failure.

Silverlight's support for adaptive streaming is scalable, allowing anyone to access their own logic to control the sources of media content and what bit rates should they use. This means that any CDN (Content Delivery Network) or media delivery provider can easily integrate with Silverlight to send high-quality videos.

Content Protection

Beta2 includes DRM Content Protection and supports both Windows DRM and playready DRM, both of which work across browsers and platforms.

Server-side playback list

Beta2 adds support for the server-side playback list (in earlier versions, only the client-side playback list is supported ).

Networking Improvement

Silverlight 2 beta2 includes a bunch of networking tasks:

Cross-origin sockets

Beta2 now supports cross-origin HTTP and sockets Networking Support (meaning that your application can call websites different from those downloaded from the current application ).

Silverlight checks whether such an XML policy file exists on the target server. This file indicates whether cross-domain network access is allowed. Silverlight supports a new XML policy file format developed by us, as well as flash policy files (meaning that it can be called in Silverlight for existing flash websites without extra effort ).

Backend thread networking

Beta2 now allows the Silverlight application to start network requests on the background thread and process network replies on the background thread. This will lead to a lot of very powerful scenarios, allowing you to Do HTTP and Socket network communication, avoid blocking the browser UI thread.

Bidirectional communication (server push)

Beta2 supports duplex communication channels with the WCF Service on the server, which facilitates a very clean programming model that allows the server to "push" messages to the Silverlight client, instead of manually polling server changes. This programming model is very useful in many scenarios, including instant messaging/chat applications, monitoring/updating applications such as stock quotations and transactions.

Web Services

Beta2 also significantly improves the interoperability with soap-based Web services. The Web Service proxy endpoint URL can be configured without re-compiling the application. Visual Studio now has a new "Silverlight-enabled WCF Service (silvelight-enabled WCF Service)" Project template. You can add it to ASP.. NET web project, publish the service to the client.

Rest and ADO. NET data services

Silverlight supports rest-based Web Services.

Beta2 adds the comparison and consumption ADO. NET data services (formerly named "Astoria") support, ADO. NET data services will act. net 3.5 SP1, which is convenient in ASP. net web project publishes data endpoints that can be consumed by any client that uses rest Uris. Silverlight beta2 now includes ADO.. NET data service client support, which allows you to easily call these services (you can also use a LINQ expression in Silverlight to represent remote rest queries for these services ).

JSON

Silverlight supports calling online JSON-based services.

Beta2 now includes the support for LINQ to JSON, allowing you to easily query, filter, and map JSON results to the Silverlight application. net object, which facilitates the call and operation of existing Ajax endpoints and Services published on the Internet.

Data Improvement

Silverlight 2 beta2 includes a bunch of data work:

DataGrid

Beta2 adds several new features to the DataGrid control, including:

• Auto-Sizing
• Sort by column (supports sorting by single column and multiple columns)
• Support for end-user column re-ordering (allowing them to drag and drop columns to reschedule the Order)
• Frozen column support (allows you to prevent customization of a specific column)
• Performance and Defect Repair

Data Binding

Beta2 adds more core data binding functions and better verification support, including:

• Support for handling the validation and bindingvalidationerror events bound to each control (you can use twoway binding to handle input verification)
• Support for expressions bound to the attached properties
• Richer support for BIND value conversion (including support for value conversion backup (fallback Support ))

Isolated Storage)

Silverlight allows applications to save data on the client (by calling it the "isolated storage" feature), and the application prompts users to grant them the permission to change the storage size (for example, A user may allow 50 MB local storage of an email program ).

Beta2 increases the size of the default local bucket provided to the Silverlight application to 1 MB. beta2 now provides better end-user support for managing the storage permissions of each website, and the ability to easily cancel/delete local storage of applications. To control these management UIS, end users can right-click the Silverlight application and select the "Silverlight configuration" menu.

Understand compatibility with Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2 beta 1

Silverlight 2 beta2 is compatible with applications targeting Silverlight 1.0.

Silverlight 2 beta2 cannot run applications targeting Silverlight 2 beta1, because we have made several API changes between the two beta versions to add new features of Silverlight 2. When the browser with Silverlight 2 beta1 installed accesses the website hosting the Silverlight beta2 application, it will prompt you to upgrade to the new Silverlight beta version. After the upgrade, if you do not uninstall beta2, you cannot run the beta1 application. This means that if you have published an application developed using beta1 on the internet, you may upgrade it to beta2 as soon as possible.

Original article address: Scott Guthrie's blog on ASP. NET and. net