Getting to know Silverlight 2 Beta 1

What we've been up to in DevDiv...

Today, Scott put up a mammoth post introducing the upcoming Silverlight 2 Beta 1. His post includes an 8 (yes, 8!) part walk through building out an application using it.  I really have to hand it to Scott on this one, and I'm not just kissing up because he's my boss.  He's been talking about this post he's been working on all week, and I went over a little bit of it with him on Monday.  But when I saw it live this morning, my jaw just about hit the floor.  To say the guy is prolific is an understatement.  Just earlier this week, he put up another big roadmap post.

I've been spending this week playing with the overall Silverlight 2 Beta 1 experience, which is coming along very nicely.   The integration between Blend and the Visual Studio tools is really, really nice.   I lack any UI design skills, but I'm starting to be able to build basic apps that look okay, and that's a big step forward to me.  I'm having fun.

What my team has been up to...

Like many new, cool, things, my team has been involved with this as well.  As a way to set ourselves up for delivering top-notch Silverlight controls in the future, we agreed to take on the task of building out some of the basic Silverlight controls, including Button, CheckBox, and ListBox.  The controls work great, are easily templatable, and will be very familiar to any WPF users out there.  My team is working with some other teams to deliver a broad suite of controls in Beta1 including DataGrid, Calendar, ToolTip, Hyperlink, and GridSplitter, among others.  Given where we are at in the product cycle, the available control Toolbox is coming along nicely.

But that's why we've been so quiet - it's been very busy.  But the model we're using - having the Silverlight Team build the runtime and a separate team build controls has really driven a lot of great feedback across the teams and resulted in a some real design and quality wins. 

Looking forward to getting this stuff out into your hands!