Silverlight 3 Beta 1 announced!

  • Article

Finally... after months of working out Silverlight 3 Beta 1, it is announced!! Now I can freely blog about the features I work on! :)

So what exactly have I been working on? Since Silverlight 2 ships, I became one of the lead PMs on a new team of Silverlight that will focus on helping developers build great RIA applications end to end. My subteam's focus will be on the UI side and we'll deliver controls and application pieces in the Silverlight 3 Toolkit and the Silverlight 3 SDK.

Some of the features my subteam delivered at MIX are:

  • ChildWindow
  • DataForm 
  • DataGrid
  • DataPager
  • Navigation (Frame, Page, Deeplinking..etc.)
  • Validation UI (ErrorSummary)

You can see these controls in action in the Silverlight Toolkit Sample. If you have feedback about any of these controls, feel free to contact me directly or post a comment on the Silverlight Toolkit forum. My team will be monitoring the forum closely.

As excited as I am about the set of features above, this is really only half of the end to end experience my team is responsible for. The other half is the .NET Ria Services, which allows developers to quickly access their data between client and server.

The .NET RIA Services is an framework that provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations

To discuss about ".NET RIA Services", you can post on the forum here. So... what are you waiting for? Go download the ".NET Ria Services" March 2009 preview!

I can't wait to hear what you think about these features!