Most of you knew it was coming and I’m really excited that its out now so I can talk about it. Silverlight 3 really is very cool and adds amazing performance improvements and additional features that people have been wanting.
My personal favourites are:
- Hardware graphics acceleration – Our application just feels way more zippy than before.
- Tighter XAP file compression – Everyone benefits from better ZIP compression ratios.
- External styles – Now you can reference an external style. Great for skinning applications.
- Out of browser/offline mode – Finally a competitor for the Adobe AIR platform.
If you are currently developing using Silverlight 2 I recommend that you install the new Silverlight 3 beta bits in a virtual machine. You can get them all from here.