New Silverlight and Expression Blend Beta

Last Friday, we released both Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview. This was a major milestone for us. Many features people were asking for in Silverlight and Expression Blend at last week's Silverlight User Group meeting such as rich UI controls, control skinning, and web services are available in the new release.

ScottGu has a comprehensive list of new features in his post. Expression Blend Team blog illustrates the detailed new features in Blend and Deep Zoom composers in their latest posts. These are two great places to learn more about the new release. Couple of things to point out about SLBeta2:

• Aside from the new features in Silverlight 2 Beta 2, it supports a go-live license which allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications.
• Silverlight 2 Beta2 is compatible with applications that target Silverlight 1.0. Silverlight 2 Beta2 will not run applications that target Silverlight 2 Beta1, since we've made a number of API changes between the two betas for the new features being added in Silverlight 2. For instructions on how to convert Silverlight Beta1 applications to Beta2, please refer to MSDN article - Silverlight Versioning. To read more about the differences between Beta1 and Beta2, MSDN article on Breaking Changes and Shawn Wildermuth's What Changed in Silverlight 2 Beta2 are great resources.