Silverlight 2 Beta 2 coming really soon
/All signs points to Silverlight 2 beta 2 coming within the week:
The biggest news I can find:
- "Pushing" data from Server to Silverlight:
- this is a new duplex channel which implements a smart-pull, the client sends a request to the server but the server does not respond unless there's something to say, and the client will just happily wait on that request (Silverlight does have multi-threading).
- If this was implemented in AJAX we'd see the browser seems to be waiting for something (a waiting connection progress bar).
- I guess when the client receives a response, it fires a new request to the server immediately and keep waiting for new messages.
- Various people have chipped in that they feel this may be cleaner than working with sockets - may be they just didn't like the way sockets sound, perhaps too low level and not abstracted enough ;-)
- A tab control!
- Still no combo drop down?
- Or trees
- Commercial go-live license
- Controls are in the runtime now, instead of being packed with your app
- Bigger initial plugin download but smaller file?
- I wonder why they don't allow the missing components to be downloaded from a signed-MS redistribution package when you need it, and have Silverlight install that on-demand. (instead of putting it in isolated storage where it can't be shared with other apps).
- Flex solutions pack controls into the swf file and no one seems to be complaining
Edit:
- Sockets goes cross-domain
