Silverlight 1.1 upgraded to Silverlight 2.0

Microsofts Silverlight is a cross platform and cross browser version of the .NET Framework. That's right folks it runs on Windows,Mac & Linux.

First quarter of 2008 they will be releasing Silverlight 2.0. This release has so many new features that they decided to up the number from 1.1 to 2.0.

Here is a break down of the new features...

WPF UI Framework: The current Silverlight Alpha release only includes basic controls support and a managed API for UI drawing. The next public Silverlight preview will add support for the higher level features of the WPF UI framework. These include: the extensible control framework model, layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, and control template and skinning support. The WPF UI Framework features in Silverlight will be a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in last week's .NET Framework 3.5 release.

Rich Controls: Silverlight will deliver a rich set of controls that make building Rich Internet Applications much easier. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for core form controls (textbox, checkbox, radiobutton, etc), built-in layout management controls (StackPanel, Grid, etc), common functionality controls (TabControl, Slider, ScrollViewer, ProgressBar, etc) and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, etc).

Rich Networking Support: Silverlight will deliver rich networking support. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for REST, POX, RSS, and WS* communication. It will also add support for cross domain network access (so that Silverlight clients can access resources and data from any trusted source on the web).

Rich Base Class Library Support: Silverlight will include a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). The next Silverlight preview release will also add built-in support for LINQ to XML and richer HTML DOM API integration.

This should spur a major migration from applications that would have been built on the desktop to be moved to the web. I'm really interested in what kind of performance this new framework will have and how far you can push it in terms of size. I wonder if there is a built in asynchronous framework to handle calls to different web services.

The blurry line between desktop application and web app has gotten a lot bigger.