An exciting first look at Silverlight 2.0 with Scott Guthrie

Scott Guthrie has done it again and posted an amazing first look at Silverlight 2.0.  Make sure to hop on over to his blog and check out the detailed tutorials he has on what to expect in Silverlight 2.0.

Some highlights in this updated release of Silverlight will include:

• WPF UI Framework: Silverlight 2 includes a rich WPF-based UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier.  In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning.  The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications.

• Rich Controls: Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications.  This upcoming Beta1 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc).  The built-in controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions.

·         Rich Networking Support: Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support.  It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services.  It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web).  Beta1 also includes built-in sockets networking support.

• Rich Base Class Library: Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc).  It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code.  It also includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support.  The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework.

As an example, he creates a Silverlight 2.0 application using just a few lines of C# and XAML code that uses the Digg.com's (Shout out to Alex and Kevin - I've watched you guys since TechTV thanks for all the great podcasts!) REST API to show how  easy it is to pull data from any source on the web and show it in a really rich way.  Not only that, it is running in Safari! 

Check it out here!

Expect to hear more exciting things in the days ahead with just 10 days left to go till MIX08!