Silverlight 4 Announced by Scott Guthrie at PDC

The Silverlight 4 beta was announced today from a keynote at the PDC by Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the Microsoft .NET developer platform. Silverlight 4 follows hot on the heels of the delivery of Silverlight 3, only three months ago. Guthrie noted that today Silverlight is installed on over 45 percent of Internet-connected devices worldwide.

Guthrie outlined a few of the features of the new release:

·         Extended out-of-browser capabilities that don’t require additional code or runtimes

·         Full support for Visual Studio 2010

·         Access to Office and SharePoint Server and improved printing, networking, reporting, and charting capabilities

·         New webcam and mic capabilities

·         Native multicast support for wide-scale media content delivery

·         60+ customizable controls

Scott Hanselman demoed some of Silverlight 4’s features with an eye toward showing Silverlight’s usefulness in the business application arena.

You can down load the beta at http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta .