OpenSilver gains more features and improved performance

A year ago we reported on the demise of Microsoft Silverlight and how OpenSilver offered an alternative for those still wanting to run Silverlight apps.

The OpenSilver developers haven't been idle in the meantime and today sees the launch of version 1.1. This allows 99.99 percent reuse of the Silverlight codebase and also guarantees an almost pixel perfect migration.

The new version adds support for additional features and third-party libraries, as well as offering a claimed three-times performance improvement over version 1.0.

"On average, we improved performance by up to three times," says Giovanni Albani, CEO of Userware, the company behind OpenSilver. "We've observed this while porting Silverlight business apps to OpenSilver for our clients. Some portions of their applications now run even faster in OpenSilver than in their original Silverlight version."

Feature improvements include a new DataGrid, based on the original code from Microsoft, the latest DataGrid is feature-packed and offers pixel-perfect backward compatibility. Most controls in the Silverlight Toolkit are now supported in OpenSilver, including: DataForm, Accordion, AutoCompleteBox, DataPager and LineSeries. There's an improved layout system too as OpenSilver now supports the Measure and Arrange Silverlight APIs for creating custom panels and layouts.

Looking ahead, VB.NET support is expected to come in OpenSilver 2.0, planned to be released early next year.

"This will make OpenSilver the only technology out there that supports VB.NET and XAML to build web apps," says Albani. "It will throw a lifeline to the huge number of Visual Basic developers that are out there, and that are sad to see their favorite programming language being progressively abandoned. As we are flooded with requests for assistance to migrate VB.NET Silverlight applications, we believe that this feature will find a lot of interest in the Microsoft developer community."

You can find out more on the OpenSilver site and the source code is available on GitHub.

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