Quick Guide to Silverlight 2 Beta 2

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Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is out! I can't believe the incredible number of changes they made between versions. Sure some of them can be a pain during upgrades (I'll talk more about this in another post) but the new features make it worth the effort :) Here's some of the highlights:

  • A built-in tab control.
  • Text wrapping support on textboxes. Woo hoo!
  • Visual State Manager. No more writing XAML to template controls.
  • A lot of the controls got rolled into the core plugin. Smaller XAPs!

The Silverlight SDK team have a nice blog post that talks about all the changes here: https://blogs.msdn.com/silverlight_sdk/archive/2008/06/04/breaking-changes-for-silverlight-2-beta-2-corrections-and-additions.aspx. There's also a downloadable document (warning, this is a large document!) that has all the changes.

I won't post another Setting Up section because silverlight.net has one that is much better: https://silverlight.net/GetStarted/. If you have Silverlight 2 Beta 1 tools installed it is best to uninstall them before attempting to set up Silverlight 2 Beta 2. I should point out that the Silverlight tools package (silverlight_chainer) comes with the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK so there's no need to download it separately. Having the Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview is really useful if you are going to do more than rudimentary XAML work.