Wednesday, November 18, 2009 8:04 PM
by
RickM
PDC09 Keynote Day 2 – Silverlight 4.0 and Free Laptops?!
Say goodbye to WinForms, WPF, and maybe even AJAX. Today Scott “The Gu” Guthrie took the stage and blew everyone away with the extensive desktop-app replacing features of Silverlight 4. This occurred directly after the exciting announcement of free Microsoft branded PDC touchscreen Windows 7 laptops for attendees. This one-two punch had an unprecedented shock and awe effect.
Silverlight 4.0
Even Migel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono fame couldn’t help but tweet his excitement at the announcement of Silverlight 4.
OMG OMG OMG OMG #silverligh4 has everything I wanted on it: full desktop apps with full system access
Silverlight 4.0 Features include:
- Trusted Apps / Com Support
- Printing / Webcam / Microphone Support
- Direct consumption of .NET 4 Assemblies
- Multicast Streaming
- Native Drag and Drop
- HTML Rendering as a Brush
- Implicit Styles
- Bidi/RTL
- Desktop Deployment on Windows and Mac
- Built-in DRM
- Huge Speedups
And a whole lot more.
I recommend checking out the video for yourself as Scott Hanselmann and Facebook’s Brian Goldfarb gave fantastic demos on these new features.
You can grab the beta of Silverlight 4 here.
The PDC Laptop
The PDC laptop is extremely cool. As it is to be the reference implementation for laptop development it has touch screen, swivel top, the whole nine yards. I’m still waiting for a full charge to power it on but here are some pics to hold you off until then:
Other Annoucements
Also announced was the Office 2010 Toolchain Open Beta which includes Office, SharePoint, Project and Visio. The presentation was hard to follow after “The Gu” left my head spinning but it seems there is a huge number of new features in this release for each of the products involved.