Day 2 keynote at Microsoft PDC 2009 was quite exciting. To sum things up: Silverlight 4 went beta, IE9 features were previewed, and we got an external hard disk, nicely fitted in a tablet-pc format case. How thoughtful!
Here’s some of the novelties:
Silverlight 4 Beta
This was a good starter… It’s really incredibly feature packed! In my opinion, I think WCF can now be called obsolete as well, but no announcements on that :-) Anyway, here’s a list of new features: webcam access, multicast streaming, offline DRM and output protection, printing, clipboard support, out-of-browser and out-of-sandbox support, drag and drop, implicit styling, a HTML control, rich-text editing, breathe, ability to share assemblies with .NET 4, data binding improvements, udp multicast, REST enhancements, TCP channel support, …
Also check Tim Heuer’s blog post over at http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx.
IE9
Yes, IE9 was announced. Running JavaScript lots faster, passing more of the ACID3 test (still not all), and the coolest part: Direct3D rendering of all graphic content. This was demoed and approved by the audience: everything is so muh faster and smoother!
WCF RIA Services
Check out Brad Abrams’ blog for this: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/11/18/welcome-to-wcf-ria-services-beta.aspx
Basically a rename of RIA services, and converted to run on top of WCF rather than an own transport layer implementation in previous versions.
Overall: a great PDC09 day two!