Silver light 1.1

Silverlight 1.1
At MIX we shipped both a beta version of Silverlight 1.0 (which will ship in final release form this summer), as well as delivered an alpha version of Silverlight 1.1.

Silverlight 1.1 includes a cross platform version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development experience within a browser. The total download size of the Silverlight 1.1 package (including all of the 1.0 features + CLR + a WPF and .NET FX library API subset + dynamic language support) is ~4MB - and it takes less than 20 seconds to install on a machine.

Some of the Silverlight V1.1 features include:

•A built-in CLR engine that delivers a super high performance execution environment for the browser. Silverlight uses the same core CLR engine that we ship with the full .NET Framework today (we build it from a single source tree). It delivers the same type-system, garbage collector, and JIT code generation engine that your .NET code uses today. This means that you can write .NET code that can now run in Silverlight, ASP.NET, and a WinForms/WPF Windows application. It also means you can now execute code within the browser that runs more than 250x faster than interpreted Javascript.
•Silverlight includes a rich framework library of built-in classes that you can use to develop browser-based applications. This framework library is a subset of the full .NET Framework class library you use today, and enables you to easily re-use your existing skills and knowledge. It includes support for collections, generics, IO, threading, globalization, networking, and LINQ.
•Silverlight includes support for a WPF UI programming model. The Silverlight 1.1 Alpha enables you to program your UI with managed code/event handlers, and supports the ability to define and use encapsulated UI controls (built with any managed .NET language). The first Silverlight Alpha doesn't yet ship with a rich set of built-in UI controls -- we've been busy at work building the core UI infrastructure first. Don't worry, though, a rich set of high-level controls will definitely be included in the future (in the meantime you can download some nice samples of controls here). WPF for Silverlight will also ultimately ship with support for core WPF constructs like layout managers and data-binding (these features are not yet implemented in the current alpha - but are coming).
•Silverlight provides a managed HTML DOM API that enables you to program the HTML of a browser using any .NET language (this means you can now wire-up an event handler to an HTML button using C# or VB). Silverlight also provides the ability to have Javascript code within an HTML page call into .NET methods you expose from within your Silverlight control/application. Silverlight includes a JSON serializer that supports automatic marshalling of .NET datatypes to/from Javascript (meaning you can have standard browser Javascript code call a C# method within Silverlight, and have the C# method return a .NET collection which is then serialized by Silverlight into a Javascript collection for your browser Javascript to use).
•Silverlight doesn't require ASP.NET to be used on the backend web-server (meaning you could use Silverlight with with PHP on Linux if you wanted to). However, we've naturally added some pretty nice features that enables you to easily integrate Silverlight on the client and ASP.NET on the server together. Silverlight can use the standard ASP.NET application services (membership, roles, profile, etc), and can call either WCF or ASMX web-services hosted within ASP.NET. This week we also shipped new ASP.NET server controls that make it easy to host Silverlight controls within ASP.NET pages.
Below is a 22 minute video I recorded that demonstrates how to build a Silverlight application from scratch using Visual Studio and Expression Blend (click here to download the UI controls I used):



You can click on the picture below to download a nice poster that provides an overview of some of the key .NET namespaces and features that are supported with the Silverlight 1.1 alpha today:



I also did a Channel9 interview that you can watch to learn a little more about how the managed programming model works within Silverlight, and how we added the CLR support:



May 10th Update: I also did a great podcast with Scott Hanselman that you can download and listen to here.

I'd also recommend watching these (free) conference sessions from the MIX conference that cover Silverlight 1.1 with .NET scenarios:

•Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Part 1)
•Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Part 2)
•Extending the Browser Programming Model with Silverlight
You can download the source code for the Part1/Part2 samples on Nick's site here.

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