What's New in Silverlight 5? - Performance and Other Improvements

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