Robs Usability Development : Silverlight, ASP.NET, Ajax, Agile, MVC & Volta

Yesterday, there was the long awaited release of Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3. So now we can finally bring all the new and exciting things onto live environments, and share it with the world: See the Light!

For those of you who haven’t had the time to follow the Beta, Silverlight 3 brings a wealth of new features features:

• Perspective 3D
• Out of Browser (OOB)
• Enhanced Font Rendering and ClearType support.
• Pixel Shaders (also check out Shazzam)
• Bitmap API (Link1, Link2)
• Organic animation effects
• Browser history and deep linking
• Element to Element Binding
• Hardware Acceleration (GPU)

Blend 3 also has gone trough a major update, some of the major improvements are:

• Sketchflow (A must have tool for every interaction designer)
• Sample Data
• Behaviors

Over the next few weeks I will write about each of these features, and show how they can impact your development.

All the downloads can be found here.

Have fun playing!

-Robertjan Tuit