image

Earlier this week, we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2! This is an important milestone for us in terms of providing rich media and interactive experiences on the web. Scott Guthrie has a very comprehensive blog post on the improvements of Silverlight 2 RTW.

Many of you may already have upgraded to the RTW version without knowing it because we've migrated Silverlight.net to the RTW version over a week ago. Later this month, people who have previous versions of Silverlight will be automatically upgraded to the final Silverlight 2 release. Couple of weeks ago, Paul talked about the breaking changes between Silverlight 2 Beta 2 with Silverlight 2 RC. If you've already updated your site with RC, then your websites should work fine under the RTW version. There are no breaking changes from Silverlight 1.0 – our goal is to maintain100% compatibility between published releases.

The tools you need to download to create Silverlight 2 RIAs are:

  • Expression Blend 2 and SP1. If you had Expression Blend 2.5 Preview, you need to uninstall Blend 2.5 first before installing Blend 2 SP1. The Service Pack exposes two key new features of the Silverlight 2 platform, control skinning and the Visual State Manager, which give designers the visual freedom and power they need to build even more compelling Silverlight 2 applications. Control skinning gives designers the ability to visually customize controls to enable them to exactly fit the function they play within an application, while the ‘Visual State Manager’ gives a flexible and visual way to control precisely how each element of a control will behave and look in a given state. I'll be posting mini-tutorials on both features.
  • Silverlight 2 tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and . If you had the old Silverlight 2 Beta 2 tools installed for VS, the new toolkit will replace the old one during installation. Make sure you also install VS2008 SP1 before installing the Silverlight tools.
  • New Deep Zoom Composer for creating rich zooming experience.

Have fun with Silverlight 2!