Microsoft Silverlight 4

There are tons of cool stuff for Silverlight 4 that are being shown in Day 2 keynote of PDC ‘09 and in the SL4 overview talk by Karen Corby. I am amazed at the speed in which the Silverlight team in Microsoft has been able to churn out releases at rapid pace – SL 1 in Nov ‘07, SL 2 in Oct ‘08, SL 3 in Jun ‘09 and SL 4 Beta in Oct ‘09.

The main features of Silverlight 4 that caught my attention are:

1. Access to Webcam, Microphone and other devices like Digital Camera
2. Print Preview and direct Print support
3. UDP Multicast, very useful for organization-wide network distribution of live video
4. Authorization support in client HTTP Stack (NTLM, Basic and Digest)
5. Same .NET compiled code runs in SL 4 and .NET 4
6. Offline DRM play support
7. Drag/Drop, Clipboard support
8. Audio and video local recording capabilities capture RAW video without requiring server interaction
9. Embed an HTML control including a Flash control inside that HTML, all usable from Brush
10. Styles support
11. RichtextArea control and better internalization text support