Silverlight 3 Beta was unveiled at MIX09. logo

It is a preview release which  continues Silverlight’s track record of rapid innovation - introducing more than 50 new features, including support for running Silverlight applications out of the browser, dramatic video performance and quality improvements, and features that radically improve developer productivity.

To get started, you’ll first want to download the tools to make Silverlight 3 Beta development productive for you.

  • Silverlight 3 Beta Tools for Visual Studio – this will install the developer runtime of Silverlight 3 Beta, the Visual Studio project templates and the Silverlight 3 Beta SDK. 
  • Silverlight 3 Beta developer runtimes: Windows or Mac.  If you installed the tools above, you will get the developer runtime and there is no need to install it again.  These downloads are being made available for test machines for the Windows and Mac platforms for your applications.
  • Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Preview – this is the preview version of Expression Blend that will enable authoring of Silverlight 3 Beta applications.
  • Silverlight Toolkit – the toolkit has been updated to provide an updated to Silverlight 2 controls, a new release for Silverlight 3 Beta controls, and a new themes gallery.  All of these can be downloaded at the Silverlight Toolkit CodePlex project site.
  • .NET RIA Services – Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. 
  • Silverlight 3 Beta Documentation – to view the Silverlight 3 Beta documentation you can view it online or download an offline CHM help file.