Here’s a quick rundown (mostly of the slide content) presented by Joe Stegman. View the session.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there were a couple of nice surprises that I didn’t believe wouldn’t make version 3, but in addition to those there are a ton of new features as listed below.

Graphics

• Perspective 3D
• Rotate any visual object by its X/Y/Z axes
• Effects and Pixel Shaders
• Pixel APIs
  • Dynamic bitmap generation
  • Render a visual tree (elements) to a bitmap
  • Image editing and effects
  • Clone visuals
  • DirectX SDK used to generate

Raw Audio/Video APIs

• Dynamic sound generation
• Custom audio/video decoders

Local Messaging

• Cross plug-in Silverlight communication: cross plug-in/tab/browser/out-of-browser
• Shared memory implementation
• Exposed like "named pipes"
• String based messages only (no byte-based, maybe later based on feedback)
• Same domain required with opt-in

UI Framework Improvements

• Merged Resource Dictionaries
• BasedOn Styles
• Styles can be “cleared”
• Multi-select ListBox
• Listening to “handled” routed events
• New VSM “Invalid” states
  • Supported on TextBox, CheckBox, ComboBox, ListBox, RadioButton, PasswordBox (coming later)

Other Improvements

• SystemColors
  • Especially useful for “high contrast” settings
• Text Improvements
  • ClearType Text (post beta)
  • CaretBrush (SL 2 caret was black)
  • Flag to optimize for animating text
  • Glyphs support for system font
• Image Refinements
  • Getting size
  • Bypass cache

New SDK Controls

• DockPanel
• Expander
• Label
• etc

Other Big Additions

• Save File Dialog
• Navigation Framework
  • “Native” integration with the browser history
• Data Control Additions
• SEO Support
• n-Tier data support
• Binary XML, SOAP faults, Credentials

Out of Browser

• Silverlight runs sandboxed on desktop
• Built into the core Silverlight runtime
• Enabled per “application”
  • Manifest update required
• More storage space by default: 25MB
• User gesture required to take “out of browser”
  • Right-click context menu option
  • Custom buttons (user action required to trigger event)
• New networking APIs
  • Connected, disconnected and changed state
  • Available in the browser, too
• Offline APIs
• Launch state, update APIs
• Add icon to install dialog
• “Take a XAP offline” – easy to deploy if everything is in the XAP. Doesn’t have to be.

Miscellaneous

• No printing support.
• No FlowDocument.
• 3 behavior changes that aren’t backwards compatible
  • Quirks-mode available
• No Commanding support
• Isolated Storage performance problems fixed