Silverlight 1.0 RC1 is Here!

As indicated in a previous post, we're homing in on the launch of Silverlight 1.0, and today marks another milestone with the launch of the first release candidate. Since the beta we released at MIX, we've fixed approximately 2000 bugs and work items and we're now feature complete with the final JavaScript-based API. This version of the runtime is vastly more stable than the beta release: our stress test runs show improvements of two or three orders of magnitude in many cases, and the product demonstrates the polish one might expect from a near-final release.

Along with the 1.0 RC1 release, we've also refreshed the 1.1 bits. We've not exposed any significant changes in the .NET extensions, but the 1.1 "alpha refresh" includes the same core runtime as 1.0 RC1. A note on installation: if you have the beta release on your machine, there's no need to uninstall - simply run the RC1 installer and it will overwrite the existing binaries on your machine.

Here's the runtime itself:

Some tools for building Silverlight applications:

Inevitably (given that this release isn't 100% compatible with the previous one, particularly as regards the object activation model), a lot of the samples out there today are broken. We've worked with a few folk that we know to help them prepare for this release, but if you have a Silverlight sample or site out there today based on the existing beta release, you'll want to pick up the new silverlight.js and work through the breaking changes to move your site up to the new release. We won't break you again, we promise!