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Yesterday at the first day of MIX09, Microsoft released the long-anticipated Silverlight 3 SDK and Runtime for developers. Upwards of 40 major updates and hundreds of smaller ones have been demoed and discovered by developers around the world. Supported by both Visual Studio (2008 and 2010 versions) and Expression Blend 3, Silverlight 3 is definitely a major release. In most aspects, it blows Flash Player out of the water. Let's jump right into some of the details, and explore some of the newly-opened doors within the Silverlight platform.

In the Audio/Video sector, full HD video support has been added, with audio codecs like H.264/ACC to match. By utilizing the GPU and analyzing bandwidth and local GPU/CPU capabilities, it can adapt to the environment and adjust media quality accordingly.

Graphics and animation have always been a part of Silverlight, but they've taken it to a new level with this release. With the addition of a 3D object plane, Bitmap caching for faster loading times, Bitmap pixel writing to allow in-place image editing, new animations and effects such as 'Spring' and 'Bounce,' custom animations through mathematical functions, and text-rendering improvements, Silverlight 3 is just about comparable to a video editor. If you can make a video with the graphical power that Silverlight 3 offers, imagine the natural, extremely interactive experiences that can be offered in web applications!

Perhaps the most noticeable addition, are the "Out of Browser Capabilities." Users can download a web application to their desktop, and use it online or offline. If used offline, the application will synchronize and send any collected data to the server. Without any coding on the developer's part, the application will update automatically when the web version is updated. This is very useful for people who are "on the go."

Silverlight 3 is packed with even more than could ever be imagined before this release. It's gone from a simply vector graphics, animation, and simple web application platform, to a scalable and powerful framework that, with every release, is coming closer and closer to attaining the powerful functionalities that we've come to expect from desktop applications.