Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for Web, desktop, and mobile applications when online or offline. Silverlight is a free plug-in, powered by the .NET framework and compatible with multiple browsers, devices and operating systems, bringing a new level of interactivity wherever the Web works.

Silverlight 4

This latest version of Silverlight delivers hundreds of features and controls that, when combined with the continued innovation in Microsoft’s world-class tools for designers and developers — Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend – present the leading edge in rapid, powerful application development. With printing support, rich reporting and charting, and integration with back-end systems and server products including Microsoft SharePoint, Silverlight is ready for business.

Silverlight 4 delivers a full suite of powerful capabilities to business application developers, bringing the best-of-breed .NET platform to browser-based experiences. Silverlight provides an ideal platform for developing and deploying modern business applications for both customer facing and staff-facing applications.

Business Application Development

Silverlight 4 consolidates its position as the natural choice for building business applications on the Web:

New Features for Application Developers

• Comprehensive printing support enabling hardcopy reports and documents as well as a virtual print view, independent of screen content.
• A full set of forms controls with over 60 customizable, styleable components. New controls include RichTextbox with hyperlinks, images, in-line controls, and editing. Enhanced controls include DataGrid with sortable/resizeable columns and copy/paste rows.
• WCF RIA Services introduces enterprise class networking and data access for building n-tier applications including transactions, paging of data, WCF and HTTP enhancements.
• Localization enhancements with Bi-Directional text, Right-to-Left support and complex scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and 31 new languages including Vietnamese and Indic support.
• The .NET Common Runtime (CLR) now enables the same compiled code to be run on the desktop and Silverlight without change.
• Enhanced databinding support increases flexibility and productivity through data grouping/editing and string formatting within bindings.
• Managed Extensibility Framework supports building large composite applications.
• Exclusive tooling support for Silverlight, new in Visual Studio 2010. Including a full editable design surface, drag & drop data-binding, automatically bound controls, datasource selection, integration with Expression Blend styling resources, Silverlight project support and full IntelliSense.

Developer tools

• Fully editable design surface for drawing out controls and layouts.
• Rich property grid and new editors for values
• Drag and drop support for databinding and automatically creating bound controls such as listbox, datagrid. New datasources window and picker.
• Easy to pick styles and resources to make a good looking application based on designer resources built in Expression Blend.
• Built in project support for Silverlight applications
• Editor with full intellisense for XAML and C# and VB languages.

Empowering richer, more interactive experiences

Silverlight is already in use as a comprehensive platform for building rich experiences both for application and pure media scenarios including HD quality, interactive video through Smooth Streaming. Silverlight 4 introduces additional capabilities to enable creation of ever more rich, appealing high-performance interactive experiences and innovative media experiences:

• Fluid interface enhancements advance application usability through animation effects.
• Webcam and microphone to allow capture of audio and video on the client.
• Bring data in to your application with features such as copy and paste or drag and drop.
• Long lists can now be scrolled effortlessly with the mouse wheel.
• Support conventional desktop interaction models through new features such as right-click context menu.
• Support for Google’s Chrome browser.
• Performance optimizations mean Silverlight 4 applications start quicker and run 200% faster than the equivalent Silverlight 3 application.
• Multi-touch support enables a range of gestures and touch interactions to be integrated into user experiences.
• Multicast networking, enabling Enterprises to lower the cost of streaming broadcast events such as company meetings and training, interoperating seamlessly with existing Windows Media Server streaming infrastructure.
• Content protection for H.264 media through Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady.
• Output protection for audio/video streams allowing content owners or distributors to ensure protected content is only viewed through a secure video connection.

Move beyond the browser

Silverlight 3 pioneered the delivery of a new class of Rich Internet Applications to work on the desktop without additional code or runtimes. Silverlight 4 extends this capability:

For Sandboxed applications

• Place HTML within your application enabling much tighter integration with content from web servers such as email, help and reports.
• Provide support for ‘toast’ notification windows, allowing applications to communicate status or change information while the user is working on another application through a popup window on the taskbar.
• Offline DRM, extending the existing Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady technology to work offline. Protected content can be delivered with a persistent license so that users can go offline immediately and start enjoying their content.
• Control over aspects of UI include window settings such as start position, size and chrome.

For Trusted applications

• Read and write files to the user’s MyDocuments, MyMusic, MyPictures and MyVideos folder (or equivalent for non-windows platforms) for example storage of media files and taking local copies of reports.
• Run other desktop programs such as Office, for example requesting Outlook to send an email, send a report to Word or data to Excel.
• COM automation enables access to devices and other system capabilities by calling into application components; for instance to access a USB security card reader.
• A new user interface for requesting application privileges access outside the standard Silverlight sandbox.
• Group policy objects allow organizations to tailor which applications may have elevated trust.
• Full keyboard support in fullscreen mode richer kiosk and media applications.
• Enhancements to networking allow cross-domain access without a security policy file.
• Custom Window ‘chrome’ to provide a highly branded experience

Intel Milestone Confirms Light Beams Can Replace Electronic Signals for Future Computers

SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 27, 2010 – Intel Corporation today announced an important advance in the quest to use light beams to replace the use of electrons to carry data in and around computers. The company has developed a research prototype representing the world's first silicon-based optical data connection with integrated lasers. The link can move data over longer distances and many times faster than today's copper technology; up to 50 gigabits of data per second. This is the equivalent of an entire HD movie being transmitted each second.

Today computer components are connected to each other using copper cables or traces on circuit boards. Due to the signal degradation that comes with using metals such as copper to transmit data, these cables have a limited maximum length. This limits the design of computers, forcing processors, memory and other components to be placed just inches from each other. Today's research achievement is another step toward replacing these connections with extremely thin and light optical fibers that can transfer much more data over far longer distances, radically changing the way computers of the future are designed and altering the way the datacenter of tomorrow is architected.

Silicon photonics will have applications across the computing industry. For example, at these data rates one could imagine a wall-sized 3D display for home entertainment and videoconferencing with a resolution so high that the actors or family members appear to be in the room with you. Tomorrow's datacenter or supercomputer may see components spread throughout a building or even an entire campus, communicating with each other at high speed, as opposed to being confined by heavy copper cables with limited capacity and reach. This will allow datacenter users, such as a search engine company, cloud computing provider or financial datacenter, to increase performance, capabilities and save significant costs in space and energy, or help scientists build more powerful supercomputers to solve the world's biggest problems.

Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer and director of Intel Labs, demonstrated the Silicon Photonics Link at the Integrated Photonics Research conference in Monterey, Calif. The 50Gbps link is akin to a "concept vehicle" that allows Intel researchers to test new ideas and continue the company's quest to develop technologies that transmit data over optical fibers, using light beams from low cost and easy to make silicon, instead of costly and hard to make devices using exotic materials like gallium arsenide. While telecommunications and other applications already use lasers to transmit information, current technologies are too expensive and bulky to be used for PC applications.

"This achievement of the world's first 50Gbps silicon photonics link with integrated hybrid silicon lasers marks a significant achievement in our long term vision of ‘siliconizing' photonics and bringing high bandwidth, low cost optical communications in and around future PCs, servers, and consumer devices" Rattner said.

The 50Gbps Silicon Photonics Link prototype is the result of a multi-year silicon photonics research agenda, which included numerous "world firsts." It is composed of a silicon transmitter and a receiver chip, each integrating all the necessary building blocks from previous Intel breakthroughs including the first Hybrid Silicon Laser co-developed with the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2006 as well as high-speed optical modulators and photodetectors announced in 2007.

The transmitter chip is composed of four such lasers, whose light beams each travel into an optical modulator that encodes data onto them at 12.5Gbps. The four beams are then combined and output to a single optical fiber for a total data rate of 50Gbps. At the other end of the link, the receiver chip separates the four optical beams and directs them into photo detectors, which convert data back into electrical signals. Both chips are assembled using low-cost manufacturing techniques familiar to the semiconductor industry. Intel researchers are already working to increase the data rate by scaling the modulator speed as well as increase the number of lasers per chip, providing a path to future terabit/s optical links – rates fast enough to transfer a copy of the entire contents of a typical laptop in one second.

This research is separate from Intel's Light Peak technology, though both are components of Intel's overall I/O strategy. Light Peak is an effort to bring a multi-protocol 10Gbps optical connection to Intel client platforms for nearer-term applications. Silicon Photonics research aims to use silicon integration to bring dramatic cost reductions, reach tera-scale data rates, and bring optical communications to an even broader set of high-volume applications. Today's achievement brings Intel a significant step closer to that goal.

On the heels of Google introducing automatic updating for the Adobe Flash plug-in, a future version of Google Chrome will include technology that blocks out-of-date plug-ins and helps users update them, Google said.

The company did not provide a timeline for this feature, except to say it will be "medium-term," in a post Monday on The Chromium Blog.

The browser also will eventually offer a warning when a user is about to run infrequently used plug-ins.

"Some plug-ins are widely installed but typically not required for today's Internet experience," the post said. "For most users, any attempt to instantiate such a plug-in is suspicious and Google Chrome will warn on this condition."

Google Chrome already offers the ability to disable individual plug-ins or run only plug-ins that are on a list of trusted domains, and it offers auto-update for Adobe Flash Player. Chrome also has PDF support via an internal plug-in.

From cnet.com

Flaunt new theme, Tabs on top, Speed bumps

Mozilla has released the first candidate build for its Firefox 4 browser beta, with the latest version slated for an official launch in November later this year.

If you cannot wait that long, then you can check out the latest developer build of the all-new Firefox here.

You can see those slides over on Mozilla's Mike Beltzner's blog, the director of Firefox at Mozilla. Beltzner promises that Firefox 4 will be 'super-duper' fast, support the next generation HTML5, bring touchscreen and 64-bit support, and offer a completely revamped user interface.

Tabs move up top

Indeed, the first major change in the user interface (UI) that you will notice on downloading the Firefox 4 beta is the fact that the default position of tabs is now at the top of the screen. It immediately makes the browser look a lot less cluttered. Mozilla has clearly taken a leaf out of Opera and Google Chrome's design guides.

Firefox 4 will also debut JaegerMonkey, an extension to Mozilla's JavaScript engine that works alongside TraceMonkey, which will enable a notable bump in the browser's speed.

Firefox 4 will represent a major overhaul of the browser; a step change by Mozilla in response to rival browsers' improvements.

Fluid plans

The slides, which appeared on Mozilla's Mike Beltzner's blog, indicate some of the improvements, as well as an early timeline – which could of course be subject to change.

"Please understand that these plans are fluid and are likely to change," blogs Beltzner - who is director of Firefox at Mozilla.

"As with past releases, we use dates to set targets for milestones, and then we work together to track to those targets.

"We always judge each milestone release against our basic criteria of quality, performance, and usability, and we only ship when it's ready."

Improvements

Mozilla indicates that Firefox 4 will be 'super-duper' fast, support the next generation HTML5, bring touchscreen and 64-bit support, offer a completely revamped user interface, hot swappable add ins, better stability and 'empower' users to take control of their data and web experience.

Of course, many of those improvements are to be expected from any major browser release. Speed remains a key factor as the browser is asked to do increasingly complex operations, and support for HTML5 represents the next great wave of internet standards.

If you need any further convincing to go and check out the new Firefox 4 beta, then you might also want to check out the demonstration video posted earlier this week by Mozilla's Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer on Firefox, explaining why tabs on top is now the default look for Firefox in Firefox 4.

And if that still doesn't convince you that tabs-on-top is the future of your Firefox browser experience, then you can always choose to revert back to the old school tabs-below-the-URL-bar look.