Are there any major advantages to Upgrading Silverlight from 2 to 3?

Question

Is it worth updating a Silverlight 2 project to Silverlight 3? Or should I just wait for four.

We currently have several Silverlight 2 projects in a web application and would like to know if there are benifits.

So far I have this:

Moonlight(silverlight for linux) only supports V2

quite a few code changes in the projects I have which would require

Answer 1

If you are building a LOB application then Silverlight 3 or 4 are worth switching to. If Moonlight is important to you then I would go for Silverlight 3 now rather than waiting for Silverlight 4 because you are likely to get the Moonlight support sooner.

Answer 2

I would recommend switching to SL4 if you want many advanced features which are present in a traditional desktop Application. Some of them are

• You can have better clipboard support -- I just heard about it, have to check it out
• Printing support will be added. At present it is not there
• At present if you try to scroll a DataGrid using your mouse ball, it doesn't work. It is there in SL4
• You can create right-click menus to handle right-clicks. Reminds you of desktop apps?
• You need Microphone access? Or webcam access? At present Flash can do it but Silverlight cannot. It is there in upcoming SL4
• I heard that RichTextArea is also coming. I need to confirm this and tell
• Somone I know was talking about support for codecs like H.264! Since Microsoft has paid the royalty for H.264 to MPEG LA, they can probably think of putting it inside Silverlight 4 for streaming videos. My 2 cents :)
• Probably they are giving some more enhancement in DataGrid apart from mouse-wheel. Let's see.

Apart from that as far as I remember from the Silverlight 4 beta announcements, can anyone confirm?

• Notification API
• COM Support
• Better themeing support
• Drag and Drop

Probably the list is endless.

OTOH if you want a list of what's new in Silverlight 3, you probably need to read the release notes or here are a few things, I have no idea if you need them or not.

• NetworkStatus API to check if network is available or not. i.e. Connected/Disconnected
• It can use GPU to relieve your CPU from the heavy stress
• If you want to make beautiful UIs, then Pixel Shader can come to your use.
• I have never tried, but heard that there is Perspective 3D support too.