I see on the Channel 9 home page that we've hit the milestone of one hundred videos posted on WPF/Avalon. The latest video is one of my favorites so far - the ever-entertaining Kevin Moore (of KevinButton and Bag'o'Tricks fame) talking about and demonstrating all the new innovations in WPF 3.5. (For a potted summary for those with a low attention span, this blog post contains some of the highlights.)

It's interesting to go back to some of the earlier Channel 9 videos on Avalon to see some of the changes and (oops) schedule slips. Unfortunately, some of the older videos look like they've been archived, which is a great pity. We should get them up on MSN Soapbox or somewhere for posterity's sake, at least. It's fun to now be talking about the second release (shipping at the same time as Visual Studio 2008), and I'm looking forward to talking about the release after that before very long now (one of the things I'm spending a fair amount of time on right now). WPF has a rosy future ahead of it...

Now that the API-complete RC releases of Silverlight have been out for a couple of weeks, most developers have moved their Silverlight-based applications over to the new build. Here's an updated list of 50+ samples and applications that run on the Release Candidate builds:

2D Physics Engine, Amazon Search Visualization, Ant Attack, AOL Social Mail Gadget, Beatboxing, Bubble Factory, Bubblemark, Color Picker, Comic Book Viewer, Destroy All Invaders, Digger, Discovery Channel Never Miss TV, DotNetNuke Video Module, Dr Popper, EuroJobWeb, Flowers-For-You, Glyph Map, GOA WinForms Demo, Grand Piano, Infragistics Controls Demo, InkPresenter, JavaScript / .NET Chess, JellyGraph, Khet, Laugh-o-Sphere, Layout Controls, Line Graph, Major League Baseball, Michael’s Journal, Monotone, Nibbles Tutorials, Office Ribbon, Popfly, Python Console, Reflection Builder, Reflector for Silverlight, ReMIX07 Tokyo, Roxio Buzz, Silverlight Airlines Demo, Silverlight Chess Game Replay, Silverlight Mind Map, Silverlight Pad, Silverlight Rocks, SilverNibbles, Skinkers LiveStation, Sprawl, Surface Prototype, Telerik RadControls 3D Cube, Vertigo Flight Simulator, XPS Viewer, Zero Gravity

I know of a number of applications that are held back for the launch, but you'll see in the above list a growing list of big names starting to add Silverlight support, including AOL, Discovery Channel and Major League Baseball. If you've got a working sample or website that you want to see featured, please feel free to add it to the comments section of this mail.

In other Silverlight news, we've issued another update: RC3 is build 1.0.20806.0. If you right-click on any Silverlight application and choose the "Silverlight Configuration" menu, you'll see the screen shown here, which you can use to check whether you're running the latest version or not. 

One important thing to note: if you're running the 1.1 builds (as I'm sure most developers are), we don't auto-update your machine. Since you're on the "development" fork, we require you to manually update your machine (simply run the install from the link here and your machine will get the latest bits). The current 1.1 bits are v1.1.20806.0 (the build number matches, just the major and minor version numbers are different).

Lastly, we've noted a few issues with ASX playlists. Next week's build will fix those - stay tuned... If you spot any other bugs, please report them in the forums or the comments section of this blog, and we'll try and repro. We're very nearly done now, and then onward to 1.1!

As we close down on the release, we're actually pushing out an update to the Silverlight RC build in the next couple of hours. The update is Sunday night's drop - build 20730 (the last release was 20724), and I'm going to informally dub it "RC2" for ease of reference.

This is one of a few critical updates that we'll be pushing down over the next couple of weeks to test the update mechanism. If you've set your update options to prompt on install, you'll see a dialog very like the following when you next visit a page that contains Silverlight functionality:

All updates will require a restart at some time to take advantage of the functionality changes. All prompted updates can be “postponed” by not restarting the process until you are ready; when you next restart the browser or open a new window, you'll see the updated version (you can right click on any Silverlight content and choose "Silverlight Configuration" to see which build is actually running).

There's no additional work required to support this release - there are zero breaking changes compared to the RC1 release, and you don't need to update your silverlight.js file or anything else for your code to work.

To be clear, we're not pushing this update out because we've found a security issue; it's more of a public test of our update broadcast system (with the added bonus that you get the latest bits installed). We'll do a few more of these on an approximately weekly basis until we release the final Silverlight 1.0 bits; from that point on we'll only update like this as necessary to fix a critical issue.