Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Silverlight Framework - All Historical Tool Releases and What is New

by bartczernicki.nospam@nospam.gmail.com (Bart Czernicki) via Silverlight Hack on 11/2/2010 11:05:00 AM

Abstract:  This article looks at all the major historical Silverlight and related technology releases.  Plus I look at what was recently announced at the PDC 2010 and evaluate Silverlight support for new technologies.

Much has been said about Silverlight being deprecated, repurposed or even "dead" by the media and fellow bloggers.  In this article I wanted to look at a timeline of all the releases Microsoft and others have made that relate to Silverlight.  I also wanted to take a look at some of the recent and upcoming releases for the Silverlight framework.

Timeline History of Silverlight

Below is a timeline of all the Silverlight related releases.  I included a bullet list with details.  Click here for a large to see image.

Note: Only the major releases are highlighted below

• 09/2007 - Silverlight 1.0
• 10/2008 - Silverlight 2.0, Expression Blend 2 SP1, Silverlight Control Toolkit
• 03/2009 - Silverlight Control Toolkit (200903)
• 07/2009 - Silverlight 3.0, Expression Blend 3 + Sketchflow, Silverlight Control Toolkit (200907)
• 11/2009 - Silverlight Control Toolkit (200911)
• 12/2009 - Bing Maps Silverlight Control
• 01/2010 - Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework 1.x
• 04/2010 - Silverlight 4.0, Silverlight 4 Toolkit, WCF RIA Services 1.0, Visual Studio 2010 Support, F# Support, MEF Support, WCF Data Services, Silverlight Unit Test Framework
• 05/2010 - Prism 2.2 for Silverlight 4
• 06/2010 - SharePoint 2010 (Native web part support & Silverlight client for SP data), Silverlight Smooth Streaming Client
• 07/2010 - Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework 2.x
• 06/2010 - Expression Blend 4 RTM, Silverlight PivotViewer 1.x, Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework 1.x
• 09/2010 - Windows Phone 7 Silverlight SDK, Blend for WP7, WP7 Control Toolkit

So whats the point?  As you can see the investments in Silverlight have been accelerating rapidly.  It would be a complete 180 for Microsoft to deprecate or ditch this technology.  Future will tell if Microsoft will support these technologies.

What is New upcoming with Silverlight? (PDC 2010 stuff you probably missed)

There was NO Silverlight at the PDC.  Wrong!  A lot of frameworks, tooling outside the "major" Silverlight releases really fly under the radar.  Below I noted some things that are new and some of the releases that Microsoft has updated in the last month or so for Silverlight.

• WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta: 
  • New features include: complex types, shared entity support, Localization etc.
  • http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=205085
• WCF RIA Services (October 2010 Toolkit for RIA Services SP1): 
  • New features include: Azure Table Storage Support, code generation, business templates etc.
  • http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=a23325ef-7b1f-4c92-9fd5-ffee48f7c7bc
• Visual Studio Async CTP
  • Next-gen preview of C#/VB.NET features that allow easier asynchronous programming techniques.  INCLUDES a Silverlight library that support Task based declerative parallelism (very cool stuff)
  • Note: The default example is written for......Silverlight 4 :)
    • http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=asyncdocs&DownloadId=14261
  • http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx
• Announced that WPF will be able to host Silverlight content natively
  • This is a pretty neat ability.  Imagine writing a Silverlight app and being able to host it on the web, web parts and in WPF
• IIS Media Services 4.0 Released
  • Extends the IIS 7.x story as a media delivery platform.  Includes new smooth streaming/DVR features.
  • http://blogs.iis.net/chriskno/archive/2010/11/01/iis-media-services-4-0-released.aspx