I have been eagerly waiting for the final release of Silverlight 2. And now it is here before the schedule. Kudos to Silverlight team.
There are a few things on my wish list that are not yet here though:
- Unrestricted outbound socket communication, where the policy file is not needed, and port range extended to cover FTP, SMTP, POP and other important ports. This will allow developers to create serious Silverlight applications and to beat Flash hand downs.
- Bitmap drawing and rendering, so that we can develop face recognition, photo editing, and other drawing-related software. Our developers desperately need this to create a Logo and Button Generator in Silverlight. Some customers want to get some cool effects off Bitmap Pixel Shading too.
- Non-blurry text. It is quite distracting to read text in Silverlight application, since it's all blurry. The anti-aliasing is too much. The problem is rooted down to WPF, more specifically in the way it renders text to favor positioning accuracy over legibility. More info
- Support for Khmer language. This is a bit personal, since I'm a Cambodian and would like to see some progress for Cambodia IT, as it is stuck between the incompatibilities and supports. Unicode has finalized the Khmer characters standard years ago, and Vista has officially supported it. But .NET, WPF and Silverlight don't render Khmer text correctly, as these technologies don't go well with the Microsoft Uniscribe Engine and GDI+. More info
Hopefully these things got off my wish list some day (by actual implementations). Anyhow, today is a milestone for Silverlight. The web landscape will be changed forever.