What's New in Silverlight for Windows Phone

Silverlight for Windows Phone includes a read-only RichTextBox control that enables you to display rich text. You can display text with character or paragraph formatting, hyperlinks, and inline images. For more information, see RichTextBox Overview and RichTextBox.

The Viewbox control is a content decorator that takes one child element and stretches it or scales it to fit the size of the Viewbox. For more information, see Viewbox.

The WebBrowser control provides a surface for displaying HTML content when the application runs outside the browser. This control is now based on Internet Explorer 9. For more information, see WebBrowser.

You can now capture source input from the user's audio device or video device. The CaptureImageAsync method enables simple capture scenarios and the VideoBrush.SetSource method enables a simple video playback scenario. Webcam and microphone capture both use a sink metaphor for establishing a listener class, and obtaining a capture requires client user permission for capture device access.

Windows Phone devices now support 32 bit-per-pixel (bpp) images. The default is 16 bpp, but you can change this setting in the WMAppManifest file to 32 bpp. For more information, see Application Manifest File for Windows Phone.

The System.Net.Sockets namespace has added support for UDP multicast clients. This enables network clients to take advantage of multicast applications that more efficiently use network resources. For more information, see the Working with Multicast topic and the System.Net.Sockets.UdpAnySourceMulticastClient and System.Net.Sockets.UdpSingleSourceMulticastClient classes.

The WebClient class now returns on the calling thread. This means calls with WebClient have improved performance. If you call WebClient on a background thread you will need to marshal the call back to the UI thread. The behavior of WebClient in Windows Phone OS 7.0 applications has not changed.

Silverlight for Windows Phone introduces APIs to support clipboard object access. You can get or set Unicode text information to a shared Clipboard object. Note that such access requires opt-in user permission and is limited to Unicode text data. There are additional restrictions as described in the Clipboard class.

In Silverlight for Windows Phone, ButtonBase and Hyperlink support Command and CommandParameter properties. The Command property can reference an ICommand implementation that comes from a view-model data source, through a {Binding} usage. The command is then interpreted at run time. For more information, see ButtonBase.Command or Hyperlink.Command.

You can now set a Style implicitly. Implicit styles allow you to apply a certain style to all elements of certain type. For more information, see Style.

You can now set the direction of content and layout of each control to flow from right to left. This enables you to develop Windows Phone applications in international languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic. You set the flow direction with the FlowDirection property. For more information, see FlowDirection.

You can now use the CompositeTransform class to apply multiple transforms to the same object, such as skew and rotate. This class applies multiple transforms in a preferred order and is generally better suited for applying multiple transforms to an object instead of using the TransformGroup class.

Silverlight for Windows Phone data binding now supports the following features:

• Binding to DependencyObject instances.

• Binding to String indexers.

• Ability to specify String formatting options through the StringFormat property.

• Ability to specify default display values through the FallbackValue and TargetNullValue properties.

• Ability to group collection items through the GroupDescriptions property of the CollectionViewSource class.

• Support for the ICollectionViewFactory interface, which enables custom data-entity collections to provide custom ICollectionView implementations to the CollectionViewSource and DataGrid classes.

• Support for complex, multi-property validation of bound objects that implement the INotifyDataErrorInfo or IDataErrorInfo interface. This includes support for these interfaces by the binding engine and by user-interface controls such as DataGrid.

For more information, see Data Binding.

A new DataServiceCollection<T> class provides simplified binding for data returned by WCF Data Services. This class inherits from the ObservableCollection<T> class to automatically update bound data when there are changes to data in bound controls. For more information, see How to: Bind Data Service Data to Controls (WCF Data Services/Silverlight).

To support culture-sensitive formatting, the TimeSpan structure now implements the IFormattable interface and includes new overloads of the ToString, Parse, TryParse, ParseExact, and TryParseExact method. Its formatting and parsing methods also support both standard and custom format strings.

The following list describes new capabilities and improvements added to Silverlight for Windows Phone.

• The new String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace method indicates whether a string is null, empty, or consists only of white-space characters. New overloads have been added to the String.Concat and String.Join methods that concatenate members of System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<T> collections.

• The String.Concat method lets you concatenate each element in an enumerable collection without first converting the elements to strings.

• The StringBuilder.Clear method make is easier to clear a StringBuilder instance.

• The Mutex class was added to support fast application switching.

• Additional cryptography support was added. For more information see the System.Security.Cryptography namespace.

• The System.Guid structure now contains the TryParse and TryParseExact methods.