Silverlight 5 and Telerik RadControls – What you need to know!

Introduction

The Silverlight 5 Release to Manufactures (RTM) is now available to download from the Silverlight site. Telerik is very excited about this release as well as WPF as you can see in our latest Q3 webinar. We can confirm that all of our tests against the latest release were successful. We will be releasing the SL5 build shortly but no longer than the end of the month. Please use this release to update your Silverlight 5 Beta/RC code to work with and use the new features.

Download the bits:

• Visual Studio 2010 SP1 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1 is required to develop Silverlight 5 Applications.  Visual Studio 2010 SP1 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1.
• After you have installed VS2010 SP1 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1 then you will need to download and install the Silverlight 5 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 SP1.
• In the meantime, you can get started with our RadControls for Silverlight to get a taste of what is to come!

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions):

1. I’ve heard rumors that Silverlight 5 will only be supported in Internet Explorer, is this true? False, Silverlight 5 will support all major browsers including : IE 9, 8, 7, 6, FireFox 3.6+, Safari 4+ and Chrome 12+. (Reference: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/what-is-silverlight/)
2. Is Silverlight 5 going to be officially supported by Microsoft and if so then how long? Silverlight 5 will support the browsers listed above through 10/12/2021. That is almost 10 years, that Microsoft will be supporting this platform. (Reference http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifean45#sl5)
3. Will Silverlight 5 run on a Mac? Yes, Silverlight 5 fully supports Mac OSX. The only items that will not work are 3D features requiring DirectX and p/Invoke/Com.

Here is a short list of the new features in Silverlight 5:

• Multiple Window Support
• Ancestor RelativeSource Binding
• Implicit DataTemplates
• ClickCount
• Binding on Style Setter
• Realtime Sound (low-latency Audio)
• Variable Speed Playback (“Trick Play”)
• Linked Text Containers - Text will overflow from one to the next.
• Custom Markup Extensions – Allow you to run custom code from XAML.
• XAML Binding Debugging - Setting breakpoints in XAML
• 3D Graphics API - accelerated visualization and rich user experiences
• P/Invoke support for calling native functions
• 64 bit support

Do you need some help learning about the new features? Then check out my 10 Laps around Silverlight 5 guide hosted at SilverlightShow.

Also be sure to check out the Telerik Silverlight controls overview page to see what we have been working on! If you have any questions then feel free to let me know.