Hi,
Since i wasn't one of the lucky ones on Las Vegas, i saw the keynote on http://live.visitmix.com/
From the keynote the most important news, for me, was the following:
Silverlight 3 (beta for now) features
- Support for Higher Quality Video & Audio – With support for native H.264/Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) Audio, live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming, full HD (720p+) playback, and an extensible decoder pipeline.
- Empowering Richer Experiences – Silverlight 3 contains new 3D graphics, animation features, hardware accelerated effects and text improvements that enable designers and developers to create next generation Web visuals.
- Improving Rich Internet Application Productivity – New features include: 60+ controls with source code. Deep Linking. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Enhanced Data Support. Improved performance through: Application library caching,
- Advanced Accessibility Features – first browser plug-in to provide access to all system colors, allowing partially-sighted people to make changes such as high contrast color schemes for ease of readability by using familiar operating system controls.
- Out of Browser Capabilities – Enables users to place their favorite Silverlight applications directly onto their PC and Mac, with links on the desktop, the new experience enables Silverlight applications to work whether the computer is connected to the Internet or not.
Also new tools got released too:
(Important note, if you install silverlight 3 beta tools for vsto, you won't be able to develop Silverlight 2 apps)
- Silverlight 3 Beta Tools for Visual Studio – this will install the developer runtime of Silverlight 3 Beta, the Visual Studio project templates and the Silverlight 3 Beta SDK.
- Silverlight 3 Beta developer runtimes: Windows or Mac. If you installed the tools above, you will get the developer runtime and there is no need to install it again. These downloads are being made available for test machines for the Windows and Mac platforms for your applications.
- Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Preview – this is the preview version of Expression Blend that will enable authoring of Silverlight 3 Beta applications.
- Silverlight Toolkit – the toolkit has been updated to provide an update to Silverlight 2 controls, a new release for Silverlight 3 Beta controls, and a new themes gallery.
- .NET RIA Services – Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations.
- Silverlight 3 Beta Documentation – view documentation online or download an offline CHM help file.
Windows Azure
- Full Trust Apps
- Raw ADO.NET support
- Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio March 2009 CTP extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure. Please note that this is a CTP release and should not be used on production systems.
- Commercial version in the end of 2009
Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview
- Another interesting tool got released by the Expression Web Team today: SuperPreview. This tool enables developers to see how their sites look in different browsers. Not with all the browsers they showed in the keynote at MIX09 today, it’s limited to IE6 and IE versions already installed on your computer, but still a handy tool. If you install it on Windows 7 you will not have IE6 in the browser list.
To download this tool click here to to see screenshots first go to http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/archive/2009/03/18/Microsoft-Expression-Web-SuperPreview-for-Windows-Internet-Explorer.aspx