Silverlight 2.0 Roadmap

Scott Guthrie announced on his blog the product roadmap for ASP.Net, IIS7 and Silverlight.

With the enhancements to Silverlight that are being made with the next release, we realized that naming it Silverlight 1.1 would not properly reflect the amount of work that is going into it.  Specifically, we are renaming Silverlight 1.1 to Silverlight 2.0!

Expect a Silverlight beta with a "Go Live" license to be out sometime in Q1 of 2008.

Here is a quick update to the feature set that we expect to be out:

• 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.

Of particular excitement is the new input controls.  Texbox, checkbox, radiobutton, etc....  Originally, those were not planned for the release and many of us had to dig up, or roll our own input controls.  Phew, thank goodness I don't have to deal with that anymore!  That just means that now we can get down to the serious work of building real business solutions on top of Silverlight 2.0 in the very near future.

-bob

Technorati Tags: Silverilght

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 29, 2007
  Scott Guthrie announced on his blog the product roadmap for ASP.Net, IIS7 and Silverlight. With the enhancements

• Anonymous
  January 25, 2008
  Hmm, with so much additions in SL 2.0, will it increase the size of the download significantly? Currently it's already 10MB. If it's going to increase until 20MB or more, that is going to be another major issue. Regards, James.

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2008
  Hi, The question is WHEN ?

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2008
  Attend MIX08 and find out! http://visitmix.com/2008/default.aspx -bob

• Anonymous
  February 06, 2008
  What is being done to allow indexing of SL apps/sites by search engines? Thanks and keep up the excellent work. Tim Misra MCP, MCAD.Net, MCSD.Net

• Anonymous
  March 04, 2008
  Bob, how will sl 2.0 be integrated into an ASP.NET Web application?  Will it become the front-end of the application?

• Anonymous
  March 06, 2008
  Hi Dean. The Silverlight plug-in is browser based, that is it runs on the client in the browser. You can serve up a page from ASP.NET that leverages Silverlight in the browser. It is up to you what percentage of your user interface you want to implement using Silverlight vs HTML. You are in control of that decision. We are coming out with controls for ASP.NET that make it straight forward to add Silverlight capbilities to your applications. Check out the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions (http://quickstarts.asp.net/3-5-extensions/silverlight/default.aspx)

• Anonymous
  March 06, 2008
  This is for Tim Misra: Indexing of Silverlight by search engine spiders is possible since XAML is text based. Tags can be placed into the XAML.

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2008
  Any support for WCF in Silverlight 2.0?

• Anonymous
  April 01, 2008
  Bob, the first beta is out and many of the items you mention in the header of the blog are not there (i.e. combobox, tab, etc.). Can you comment on whether these are still slated for inclusion?

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2008
  WCF is supported in Silverlight 2.0. You can easily generate proxies to WCF end points with the 'Add a Service Referece...'. Cross Domain calls are also supported with an Opt-In mode. You can add a policy file to the root domain of a service site to open up end poitns to cross domain calls. In addition there is a simple HTTP Request/Response capability using the WebClient class. This is how you can do RSS, POX and JSON calls.

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2008
  re: Missing Controls Well the final list has not been announced but I agree there was a mismatch between what was announced and what showed up in the SL Beta 2. Check out this site for some details on the controls that are in the beta: http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=14851