Going Native
The final and most exciting feature for applications that target Windows platforms will be the post-beta addition of p/Invoke. Also known as platform invocation services, p/Invoke is the bridge between managed and unmanaged code. In the previous versions of Silverlight, the only way to access unmanaged code was through a COM wrapper, which provides additional complexity and overhead. By being able to access managed code directly, Silverlight applications can now leverage legacy code in the enterprise, such as older drivers to peripheral devices or processes that were written before the .NET platform came into prominence.