Introduction
In this article, we'll have a brief discussion
of the performance, networking, and other improvements in Silverlight 5.
Performance
Performance has been improved in Silverlight 5
in a number of ways:
- Significant improvement in performance
through the entire product
- Startup performance has been improved
using a multi-core background JIT compiler
- XAML parsing time has been improved
especially for UserControl and ResourceDictionary
- Added 64-bit runtime version. Not in beta
- Hardware accelerated rendering in Internet
Explorer 9 in windowless mode
Networking
And networking has its share of improvements:
- Network latency has been improved
significantly
- 90% performance improvements in
ClientHttpWebRequest scenarios
Services
Added support for WS-Trust in WCF. (WS-Trust is
a specification aimed to improve security and validation.)
Profiling and Testing
- Automated UI testing
- Improved profiling support:
- Memory
- CPU
- Thread contention
Other
- Support for Windows Azure
- In-Browser HTML support
- Many more fixes and improvements
throughout the product