Yesterday, beta 2 of Silverlight was officially announced in TechEd Orlando. There are a lot of interesting changes. One of most significant changes, I want to notice and accessibility support in Silverlight. See yourself (if you do not know what this image about, see this post)
What should you do in order this to happen? Absolutely nothing. This is build in feature in Silverlight 2.0 b2. It’s not like WPF, where you should use Automation namespace boundary. This just works. You can read the Silverlight content with screen narrators. Great respect to dev team.
Why this CEO friendly? Come to my Silverlight half day session at July, 30 to learn why.
Regarding other features, there is new templating model in Silverlight, named VisualStateManager. It can save your time in controls development. Do you remember me speaking about State oriented programming in Silverlight, rather, then KeyFrames oriented programming in Flesh? That what is it.
if (SomethingHappened) {
VisualStateManager.GoToState(this, “SomeState”, true);
}
Also, there is TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox. Regarding DataGrid it become much faster and enhanced by Reordering, Autosize and Sort capabilities.
There are also some security enhancements for Cross-Domain networking and duplex communication. If you not sure about what is it, see this and this post.
Also now you can work with LINQ-to-JSON, ASO.NET DS and SOAP-based data sources.
In additional, there is new XML-based format for DeepZoom MultiScaleTileSource and MultiScaleImage controls.
Have a nice day and be good people.