Microsoft have released an update to Silverlight 4 to patch a number of bugs and implement some minor features.
The release represents a service release for Silverlight, being only a minor version bump, but containing some fixes that Microsoft’s Tim Heuer describes as “necessary updates”. They include fixes for memory leaks when using MouseCapture and DataTemplate, DRM-related media fixes, and bringing mouse wheel support to Silverlight out-of-browser apps on Mac OS. One of the more significant changes is a boost to startup performance of all Silverlight apps, which developers are already reporting is a proving to be significant enough to be noticable in many cases.
To go with this release there is also a new version of the Silverlight developer runtime for Windows and Mac OS, as well as a new version of the Silverlight SDK. Among other things, this addresses issues caused when Visual Studio LightSwitch shipped last month with a pre-release build of Silverlight 4. There was a conflict between the versioning of the pre-release and existing production version of Silverlight on machines where both were installed – this is now resolved with this Silverlight version.
You can find out more about getting hold of the new Silverlight release and SDK on Tim Heuer’s blog; he also describes how to modify your application to require users to upgrade to the latest Silverlight version prior to use.
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