I was watching the Channel 9 video about Silverlight 3 with my hero Scott Guthrie.
Silverlight 3 has some very interesting features:
For designers
- Ground breaking Expressions tools (support for Photoshop, TFS)
For video watchers
- Live video (including pause)
- Adaptive streaming
For developers
- Good for Line of Business Applications (support N-tier architectures)
- Sync of data between Silverlight App and server-side (includes all the diff algorithms)
- Tooling
- Controls
- DataForm
- DataPager
- Navigation (SEO, deep linking)
- New Toolkit Controls
- Media
- Graphics
- 3D
- Pixel Effects
- Animation Easing
- Bitmap API
- GPU Acceleration
- Text/Image Improvements
- Element-to-Element Binding
- LocalConnection API
- Binding Validation UI
- SaveFileDialog
- Dynamic Styling and BasedOn
- CaretBrush
- Merged ResourceDictionary
- Assembly Caching (download assemblies when you need them, caches for future apps)
- Network monitoring API (am I online or offline)
- Out-of-browser and Offline
- .NET RIA Services
- Binary XML
- Web Service Utility
All these new cool features are packaged in an installer which is 30K smaller than v2!
Download the beta from http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx.