Microsoft releases Silverlight 3

BANGALORE, INDIA: Microsoft on Friday announced a major update to its Silverlight application by officially launching the Silverlight 3 version.

According to the official Microsoft Silverlight website the upgrades in this  new version includes hardware graphics acceleration and a new media codec support, new GPU acceleration capabilities and H.264 video support, enhanced application development feature, out of the browser support, significant graphics improvements including 3D graphics support.

Also, in order to fully integrate all the .NET developer tools, Visual Studio 2010 will support a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight 3.

“Silverlight 3 is a major update and delivers a ton of new features and capabilities,” said a blog post by  Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, Microsoft Developer Division.

He further added that the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download provides project support, intellisense, compilation, and debugging for Silverlight 3 applications.  The next release of Visual Studio VS 2010 - will add to this and provide a fully interactive WYSIWYG designer for Silverlight (including data binding support within the designer.

Microsoft also announced the release of Expression Studio 3 RC, which would enable rich editing of Silverlight 3 applications and projects.

“Expression Blend 3 is a major update and enables dramatically richer tooling support,” said Guthrie.

“The final release of Expression Studio 3, which includes the Blend + Sketchflow, Web, Encoder and Design products, will ship within the next 30 days,” he added.