Much improved audio and HD video support. Pros Silverlight 3 applications can run in or out of the browser, online or offline. Of course, in a few months everything will change again. Meanwhile, the next generation of streaming media adoptions are likely to be closely contested, now that the two technologies are near parity. Some mixed but Microsoft-oriented shops might phase out their Adobe work in favor of Silverlight on integration grounds, but some won't. I do expect many Microsoft shops to do more RIAs with Silverlight now that it's more capable and to create lightweight browser/desktop Silverlight 3 applications where they might have fashioned heavier-weight Windows Forms or WPF client applications. I do not expect many Adobe shops to give up their Flash, Flex, and AIR for Silverlight 3. Both of those are getting better still in version 3. Silverlight has long been strong on execution speed and language support. Recently there's been some improvement in SEO for Flash and Flex, using external JavaScript objects such as SWFObject (for dynamic loading) and SWFAddress (for deep linking), at least for those who to take the trouble to revamp their Flash sites Silverlight 3 addresses both SEO and deep linking internally. A search engine such as Google can only see the text on a Web page RIA applications historically have not displayed usable text or allowed external links to states "deep" inside the animation, concentrating instead on their forte - flashy graphics. One problem area that Flash and Silverlight have had in common is SEO (search engine optimization). Those deficiencies are all fixed in Silverlight 3. In addition, Silverlight 2 lacked 3-D graphics, pixel shader effects, writing to bitmaps, animation effects, themes, decent data binding, and a reasonable assortment of controls. For designers, the Expression Blend 3 Preview already imports Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files, another lack in Blend 2, and will add "SketchFlow" prototyping and interactive behaviors in a future release. That will be fixed in Expression Blend 3 and Visual Studio 2010, both of which have solid betas. What else was wrong with Silverlight 2? From a developer's point of view, no single tool covered all needs Expression Blend 2 did graphical XAML design but couldn't edit code, and Visual Studio 2008 did code editing and XAML editing and preview, but couldn't do graphical XAML design. Silverlight 3 addresses those issues very nicely, with easy ways to install Silverlight applications on a desktop, update them in place, detect Internet connectivity state changes, and store information locally and securely. Silverlight 2 didn't have a viable way to run on a desktop the best a developer could do along those lines was to build a desktop WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) application based loosely on a corresponding Silverlight RIA (rich Internet application). (Let's ignore the memory leak issues they all have in common for the moment.) A number of desktop Flex/AIR applications have become popular, especially Twitter clients examples include TweetDeck, Twhirl, DestroyTwitter, and Seesmic Desktop. Another area where Flash and Flex were ahead of Silverlight is Windows and Macintosh desktop operation.
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