I am here in Las Vegas for MIX10 where Scott Guthrie announced today the release of Silverlight 4 RC and the Visual Studio 2010 tools. You can now install VS2010 RC!!!
As always, downloads links are here: www.silverlight.net

He also said that the final version of Silverlight 4 will come next month (so april)!

4 months ago, I wrote a blog post on the new features of Silverlight 4 beta, so… what’s new in the RC ?

 

Rich Text

· RichTextArea renamed to RichTextBox

· Text position and selection APIs

· “Xaml” property for serializing text content

· XAML clipboard format

· FlowDirection support on Runs tag

· “Format then type” support when dragging controls to the designer

· Thai/Vietnamese/Indic support

· UI Automation Text pattern

 

Networking

· UploadProgress support (Client stack)

· Caching support (Client stack)

· Sockets security restrictions removal (Elevated Trust)

· Sockets policy file retrieval via HTTP

· Accept-Language header

 

Out of Browser (Elevated Trust)

· XAP signing

· Silent install and emulation mode

· Custom window chrome

· Better support for COM Automation

· Cancellable shutdown event

· Updated security dialogs

 

Media

· Pinned full-screen mode on secondary display

· Webcam/Mic configuration preview

· More descriptive MediaSourceStream errors

· Content & Output protection updates

· Updates to H.264 content protection (ClearNAL)

· Digital Constraint Token

· CGMS-A

· Multicast

· Graphics card driver validation & revocation

 

Graphics and Printing

· HW accelerated Perspective Transforms

· Ability to query page size and printable area

· Memory usage and perf improvements

 

Data

· Entity-level validation support of INotifyDataErrorInfo for DataGrid

· XPath support for XML

 

Parser

· New architecture enables future innovation

· Performance and stability improvements

· XmlnsPrefix & XmlnsDefinition attributes

· Support setting order-dependent properties

 

Globalization & Localization

· Support for 31 new languages

· Arabic, Hebrew and Thai input on Mac

· Indic support

 

More …

· Update to DeepZoom code base with HW acceleration

· Support for Private mode browsing

· Google Chrome support (Windows)

· FrameworkElement.Unloaded event

· HTML Hosting accessibility

· IsoStore perf improvements

· Native hosting perf improvements (e.g., Bing Toolbar)

· Consistency with Silverlight for Mobile APIs and Tooling

· SDK
  - System.Numerics.dll
  - Dynamic XAP support (MEF)
  - Frame/Navigation refresh support

 

That’s a lot!

 

You will find more details on the following links:

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/03/15/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-rc-mix10.aspx

http://www.davidpoll.com/2010/03/15/new-in-the-silverlight-4-rc-xaml-features/