Silverlight 2 released – get all the info!
Silverlight 2 has gone RTM! Read the full press release here.
Grab the Visual Studio Tools, Expression Blend Service Pack and updated Deep Zoom Composer here.
If you already have a Beta version of Silverlight 2 installed you will be prompted to upgrade to the release version the first time you hit an updated site. All Windows and Mac machines with updates enabled will automatically have their plug-in updated on Monday, October 20th.
Developers can grab the Silverlight Tools Installer that includes everything you need (plug-in, sdk, Visual Studio Tools and Blend templates). That’s right no more confusing Blend 2.5 – you can now edit Silverlight 2 projects using Blend 2 with SP1.
Some interesting announcements with this release as well. Microsoft is serious about interoperability and listening to our customers. You wanted a Silverlight development experience on Linux and Mac outside of Notepad. Announcing the Silveright plug-in for Eclipse!
Now you also have that choice on Windows – Visual Studio, Eclipse and Blend. Whichever tool you are comfortable in you can now have the full Silverlight development experience. Although I still think Blend is the best thing to happen for developers since Intellisense.
At my recent VSLive! talk in NYC I showed off some of the power of the Visual State Manager (VSM) and how easy it was to create skins for controls, share/modify them, and inherit them throughout your project. I also hinted a little about Microsoft would be supporting the VSM in all future releases of the controls. I am proud to announce the introduction of the Silverlight Control Pack (SCP). The SCP is very similar to the open source community driven ASP.NET Control Toolkit. Going forward you would be able to take any Silverlight control from this kit and skin it how you wanted. No more black box! Look for a new project to appear on Codeplex post-PDC.
Check out Tim Heuer’s blog for more in depth details on the official Silverlight 2 release.
Happy coding!
