Silverlight 2 Released

Silverlight 2 is finally released!

If you plan using it you need to install three things:

Silverlight Tools für Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Expression Blend 2.0 SP1

Deep Zoom Composer (optional)

The nice thing is, Silverlight Tools not only work in VS 2008, but also in the free version Visual Web Developer Express. Therefore you can develop Silverlight apps for free.

The Silverlight Tools contain everything you need:

  • The Silverlight developer runtime
  • Silverlight SDK (docs, additional controls: Tab, DataGrid, Date controls)
  • Visual Studio Templates, Designer, etc..
  • ASP.NET Server controls for Silverlight

There is also a Eclipse Tool for developing Silverlight applications. This tools is being developed by Soyatec in cooperation with Microsoft.

If you have used Silverlight before, see the Breaking Changes Document for new features of Silverlight RTM, which break the pre-release API of Beta 2.

That's a good point: Update your Silverlight Beta apps to RTW as soon as you can. They cannot be viewed with the new runtime!