Silverlight 2 Released

Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2.  You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here.

Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development

Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser.

Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it.  It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications.

Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby).  Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including:

  • WPF UI Framework: Silverlight 2 includes a rich 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.  The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, 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).  All Silverlight 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).  It 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 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.
  • Rich Media Support: Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support).  Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection. 

The final Silverlight 2 release delivers a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that enables you to really push the boundaries of what can be done in a browser, and enable great end user experiences.

Silverlight Customers

Over the last few months a number of very high profile sites have successfully launched using the beta releases of Silverlight 2. 

In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video content - making it the largest ever media event on the web.  Users visiting the site spent an average of 27 minutes on the site when they watched a video - an unprecedented number for online traffic.

In August, the Democratic National Convention was streamed live using Silverlight, and broadcast a 2Mbit live video feed of the event and speeches - receiving outstanding feedback from audiences watching it.

This month a number of other high profile sites are going live with the final release of Silverlight 2.  CBS College Sports Network will be streaming 20,000 hours of live games for 150+ college and university partners.  AOL is launching their new AOL Mail browser version to 60 million users using Silverlight 2.  Blockbuster will be launching their new MovieLink subscription service using Silverlight.  Yahoo! Japan is live today enabling live streaming of Major League Baseball games.  Hard Rock International will be updating their memorabilia site with new features.  And companies like Toyota, HSN and hundreds of others will be live this week as well.

Silverlight Toolkit

Silverlight 2 ships with dozens of built-in UI controls that can be used to build applications.  Below is a screen-shot of the Silverlight DataGrid, RadioButton, CheckBox and DatePicker controls in the final release:


Today we are also announcing the "Silverlight Toolkit" - which will deliver dozens of more controls that you can use with Silverlight 2.  We will continually add new controls to the control pack over the next few months (we expect to ultimately have more than 100 controls total).  The first release of the toolkit will include controls like TreeView, DockPanel, WrapPanel, ViewBox, Expander, NumericUpDown, AutoComplete and more.  All controls will ship with full source, and with a OSI license that allows you to modify and use the source for any purpose.

Interoperability

Today we are also announcing that Microsoft is partnering with Soyatec to sponsor additional tools for developing Silverlight applications using the cross platform Eclipse development platform.  Click here to learn more about this and download the free Silverlight Eclipse plugin.  Click here for a step-by-step tutorial that walks-through how to use their Eclipse tools today to build a Silverlight 2 application. 

We are also announcing today that we are releasing the Silverlight XAML vocabulary and schema under the Open Specification Promise (OSP), which enables anyone to create products that read and write XAML for Silverlight.  You can learn more about this announcement here.

Learning Silverlight 2

The best way to learn Silverlight 2 is to visit the www.silverlight.net web-site.  You can find free online tutorials, videos and training available there.  The site also hosts an online forum system where MVPs and Microsoft Silverlight team members will be able to help answer technical questions.  Also make sure to subscribe to the Silverlight Community RSS Feed, Jesse Liberty's Blog, and Tim Heuer's Blog for a daily dose of great Silverlight content.

I've recently updated my Digg-client tutorial for the final Silverlight 2 release.  This provides an end to end walkthrough of a Silverlight 2 application, and helps explain the different programming concepts behind it (controls, layout management, networking, data-binding, styles, user controls, control templates, etc).  If you are brand new to Silverlight or WPF development I recommend walking through it to understand the basics:

You can develop Silverlight 2 applications using any version of Visual Studio 2008.  Simply install the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 download to get Silverlight tooling support within it.

If you do not have VS 2008, you can alternatively install the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 Edition.  This free tool provides great ASP.NET development tool support, and starting today also now supports Silverlight 2 development.  You can follow all of the steps in my tutorial above using the Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition - and get full intellisense, debugging, and deployment support.

Upgrading from the Beta

If you have the Beta2 or RC versions of the VS Tools for Silverlight, or the Silverlight 2 Beta SDK or Developer Editions of Silverlight 2, please make sure to uninstall these completely before downloading and installing today's release.

End users who have Silverlight 1, or Silverlight 2 Beta1 or Beta2 will be automatically upgraded to the final Silverlight 2 release starting later this month.  Until then, if they visit a Silverlight 2 (final release) site, they will see the standard install prompt that a machine that does not have Silverlight installed would see.  Clicking it will upgrade their machines to the final release of Silverlight 2 (there is no need for them to uninstall anything - Silverlight 2 will cleanly install over Silverlight 1 or the previous betas). 

Because there are some breaking changes between Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the final Silverlight 2 release, end users who have the final Silverlight 2 release installed will not be able to run applications that are still targeting Silverlight Beta2.  Most major Silverlight 2 sites plan to upgrade to the final release in the next 24 hours (which will fix this issue) - if you hit a site built with Beta2 before then you might experience trouble with it.  That should go away within about a day once all sites are updated though (this was one reason why we released the public release candidate last month - to help developers get their sites ready for the final release).

Summary

Silverlight 2 is a major release that enables some great new application and media experiences to be built, and allows developers to use .NET within any browser to create them.

Thank you for all your support and feedback the last year as we've worked on it.  All of us on the Silverlight team are really excited to see what you build with it. :-)

Scott

109 Comments

  • Scott why we didn't we get Bidi languages support like Hebrew?

  • To have brought all this together in such a short time is an amazing feat. Well done to everyone involved!

  • Nice! Best thing happened in a very long time :)

  • Scott,

    Fantastic release of Silverlight & Blend! A lot of super hard work really paid off.

    Cheers,

    Karl

  • When is silverlight going to support other plateforms?

  • Do Silverlight 2.0 require administrator access in order to be installed?

    Later Silverlight 1.x released allowed non administrators to install the plugin which was really nice.

  • Congratulations, I'm looking forward to learning this technology.

    Now, if we really want to call it "cross browser", one question keeps coming up: WHEN will it work in Opera? There were absolutely no news about Opera support since the Opera/Microsoft announcement in May 2007 - is it ever going to be supported?

    Thank you.

  • Can "rich" be implied at this point :)

  • Hello Scott,

    Unfortunately the entry bar to design Silverlight and WPF applications is sufficiently high at present, insofar as the Expression suite only being available (price wise) to professional developers.

    When will you have an Express version of Expression for hobbyists?

  • Hi Liberman,

    >>>>>> Scott why we didn't we get Bidi languages support like Hebrew?

    There is a CodePlex project available today that provides basic Hebrew and Arabic support. We are looking to enable full BiDi support in a future release.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • Hi Per,

    >>>>>>> Do Silverlight 2.0 require administrator access in order to be installed? Later Silverlight 1.x released allowed non administrators to install the plugin which was really nice.

    We will release a WSUS patch that allows enterprises to install Silverlight centrally (without users having to install it manually nor elevate as admin). This will be coming out shortly.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • Hi Michal,

    >>>>>>> Now, if we really want to call it "cross browser", one question keeps coming up: WHEN will it work in Opera? There were absolutely no news about Opera support since the Opera/Microsoft announcement in May 2007 - is it ever going to be supported?

    The good news is that SL2 works well with Opera now. It isn't an officially supported browser - but we do test with it, and have fixed a number of bugs that previously imapacted it.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • I tried the RTW from a client point of view. It asked me to download SilverLight then the BLUE SPLASH SCREEN is saying Unable to install SilverLight. So I clicked on the More Information and I saw ot was saying something about the developer version needs to be updated ? Huh why its asking me this on a client computer somewhere ? I mean, I tought I would just need the pluing normal installation not a developer version. I'm confused about this

  • Hi Scott,

    First congratulations on releasing Silverlight 2! I look forward to seeing it grow and evolve over time.

    I have a question regarding a point made in the press release:

    "Improved server scalability and expanded advertiser support. This includes new streaming and progressive download capabilities, superior search engine optimization techniques, and next-generation in-stream advertising support."

    My question is about the "superior search engine optimization techniques" part. I am assuming you mean superior to Flash? I don't really care if it was meant to imply Flash or something else (don't want to kick that discussion off :D) but I can imagine that a lot of thought was given to what should be included in the press release and I was just wondering if there was more information about these superior search engine optimization techniques?

    This is an area that interests me a lot so I was just wondering if something new has been added recently to Silverlight or if a document/whitepaper/article was published that I somehow missed?

    Many thanks,

    John

  • congrats to you and the team :) the eclipse plug in is awsome as well and should help convince the haters that microsoft is serious about making silverlight cross platform, brilliant move :)

    congratulations again :)

  • Congrats on a great release, just testing from RC0 so hopefully not too many breaking changes :)

  • Congratulation Scott.I have checked the link about Eclipse it is really Great.Only Thing concerning me is about its the Final release which is expected in next spring.[may be the time when SL 3.0 will be in ready to release or in in Release candidate]
    Congratulation Once again all the Silverlight Team.

  • Hi Scott

    Quick question: We've developed an Silverlight 2 Beta 2 application for the Swedish Museum of Natural Science. Our client was supposed to demo the application in the US the next coming days. We were fully aware that any day now a new version of Silverlight was coming out, so we had fixed last week that the Beta 2 was installed and ready on the client's computer. Well, the client messed up today and downloaded Silverlight 2, and now we have no more beta. So we have two options, get hold of beta 2 somehow, or rebuild the application now, today, which we really were not prepared to do. So, do you know if it is possible to download the beta 2 somewhere? We have been planning to do the update to the release version to Silverlight 2, but not now, suddenly, in just a day or two.

    Many thanks
    Sami

  • Hi Marc,

    >>>>>>> I tried the RTW from a client point of view. It asked me to download SilverLight then the BLUE SPLASH SCREEN is saying Unable to install SilverLight. So I clicked on the More Information and I saw ot was saying something about the developer version needs to be updated ? Huh why its asking me this on a client computer somewhere ? I mean, I tought I would just need the pluing normal installation not a developer version. I'm confused about this

    There are two versions of Silverlight - a consumer version and a developer version. The consumer version upgrades automatically on top of previous releases, and wouldn't give you that end-user experience. The developer version needs to keep in sync with the VS tools installed (for things like debugger symbols) and it probably the cause of that message. You'll want to uninstall your beta2 version of the dev tools first before installing the final release - that will fix your issue.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • >Scott,
    >Congratulations. Awesome job!!
    >How can we protect our Silverlight applications from Silverlight Spy?
    Yes! how about protection?

  • Hi Scott,

    When do you estimate to have the SL Control Pack available for download ?

    Thanks,
    Claudio.

  • One thing is that should the Expression Blend 2.0 SP1 remain same what we use with SL 2.0 RC0 [release candidate that were last launch] or it is also upgraded ?

  • Good job scott,

    can we get chinese language support in Silverlight 2 release?

  • Congratulations!! Installation in progress..

  • Hi Scott,

    Silverlight still have nothing like VisualBrush, HostingRenderTargetBitmap constructor marked with [SecurityCritical] attribute. Are there any plans to "unlock" HostingRenderTargetBitmap or provide some another way to use FrameworkElement as Brush?

  • I've been waiting for this since I started learning 1.1. This is the first time I've been looking at a technology grow from it's beginnings to it's final release (well, first final release, I'm sure there's going to be 2.1, 3, 3.5...). You guys have done a great job and have given us the ability to make some amazing business applications that will look and act the same in all major browsers. Also instead of needing to learn C#, HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, you can now focus on just three (C#, XAML and SQL).

  • Hi Scott here in Brazil we still have lots of people using windows 98 , so I don't see silverlight sites happening here anytime soon. I used to work for a company that has a very accessed site and 10% of the access still uses windows 98.

  • Hi Scott,

    This is fantastic news! However, I was a little dissapointed to find that the VS tooling doesn't appear to have changed since Beta 2 - we are still unable to drag Controls onto the design surface and manipulate them.

    Am I mistaken in thinking that the intention was to provide better VS tooling with the Silverght RTW?

    Are there any plans for this or do we now have to use Blend (which incidentally doesn't seem to have Source Control integration)?

    Many thanks,
    Jason

  • Great , It finally released !

  • Hi Scott,

    In the download page is says that it is RC1 not RTW/RTM? Is this just a typo?

    Thanks,

    Dan

  • Sami,
    Only option you can have right now is that you should send your customer SL 2 Beta 2 runtime and let him say that he should uninstall SL then install this version then uncheck the option for automatic update from silverlight configuration

  • Great news! I have been waiting for this to get involved in Silverlight. I didn't want to have to learn Silverlight with Javascript, I wanted to use VB and C#. Downloading now...

    Great job, guys.

  • Wrappanel....WOOHOO...thanks Scott!! :D:D
    BTW...still can't find your MVC 4/5 AJAX demo...or is the jQuery + client templates the "officially" recommended AJAX approach?

  • Great stuff. Keep it coming.

  • "making it the largest ever media event on the web" - imagine if the entire web could access it and not only the US .... numbers would have been huuuuge

  • Congratulations on the release.
    Now Silverlight development and implementations can really take off :)

  • Time to upgrade.
    Great News! Good job Scott.

  • Do you plan on making Silverlight work within Google Chrome?

  • In our R&D meeting agenda for today, I note that on the release of a development tool I always have questions and complaints. This is the exception: what a marvelous job of anticipating what developers need, and providing it. Quite remarkable. Congratulations, and thanks.

  • Congratulation ,
    BUT when will have Menu and ContextMenu control there?

  • The Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 sp1 have yesterday as a post date, but they still say they're a release candidate version. The Expression 2 sp1 update now looks like it's an RTM/RTW version. Is the Silverlight Tools for VS still a release candidate, or is this an error on the download page? I've got all the release candidate stuff installed on a virtual machine I set up last week. I want to wait for the release versions of everthing before I install this stuff on my 'real' dev machine.

    Thanks
    (BTW, I was holding off on Silverlight until version 2, and it looks amazing).

  • Scott, this is great. Silverlight really has come a long way since its inception and it is really very impressive in terms of the features it offers.

    what is the support related to printing and interaction with HTML with Silverlight 2? are there additional features around these areas?

  • Very exciting for Silverlight 2 releasing.

  • Hey Scott,

    The link on the Silverlight getting started page points to a page says it's for Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (RC1). Is that the Silverlight RTM? Or is the Silverlight RTM provided from another source? If from another source, can you provide the direct link? Thanks,

    -Mark

  • Great news, i posted this in my blog

  • Congratulations to you and your team!

    The download links lead to "Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (RC1)".

    Did I end up in a wrong download? Or is it the RC1 that is released today?

  • Hmm. Installing the BlendV2SP1 service pack I get "Microsoft Expression Blend 2 Service Pack1 may have failed to install. Windows Installer returned error code 1605." message right after accepting the EULA. I've got the Blend 2.5 June Preview Beta installed here. Tried uninstalling Blend and reinstalling with no luck.

    Which version of Blend is the 'right' one to be running right now? I need to be able to develop against both WPF and Silverlight . . .

  • When are you going to provide Silverlight Control Pack with all those extra sweet controls? I couldn't find them anywhere... Thanks! Adam

  • Yeah .... I really wanna get my hands on the Control Pack too!! Anyone?

  • Scott, what are the plans for printing support? I have worked on a nice project that everybody likes but with the limitation of not being able to print is holding from being run into production.

  • Will Silverlight ever be able to play FLV videos?

  • SL Team, keep it up. We're expecting RTM tobe released by Nov, but, its a surprise today to see it avl.

    Scott

    To one of the reply, you've mentioned SL will be avl thru enterprise wide product update. But, to answer to the question "Whether Admin rights is required / not for installing Silverlight 2 RTM plug-in ?", was not clear. Kindly clarify. If it's required, it's going tobe a nightmare, better release SL 2 RTM as recommended patch thru Windows Update ASAP.

    BTW, is there any seperate breaking changes doc / the RC0 breaking changes list holds good for RTM version also...?

    Regards
    JiniShans

  • The download page says "Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (RC1)".

    I believe this is a mistake in the page as the downloaded Silverlight_Tools.exe file properties say the product name as 'Silverlight Tools RTW'.

  • Could someone write a blog posting about blending Silverlight 2 [form controls] with ASP.NET MVC where Silverlight is strictly the view technology interacting with controllers and models?

    This is do-able with Adobe Flex & ASP.NET MVC but I didn't have much success with Silverlight. I'd prefer to leveraging Silverlight instead.

  • Is there a Url where people can go and download the Beta 2 runtime if they already got the v2 release?

  • I didn't uninstall RC0.. but installation completed without warning/incidence.. am I safe? I now notice your blog says "If you have the Beta2 or RC versions of the VS Tools for Silverlight, or the Silverlight 2 Beta SDK or Developer Editions of Silverlight 2, please make sure to uninstall these completely before downloading and installing today's release.".

    -Chau
    DNAfor.NET

  • Great Work Scott,

    When can we expect, Mobile Handset Support on Silverlight. Some things similar to Flash-lite.

  • You previously mentioned that AAC and H.264 will be supported pretty soon in Silverlight. I do not see that anything related to these mentioned in the feautre chart. Could you tell us if any such support is included and if not included when should we expect support for these? Also, is there any plan to support PCM or WAV codec?

  • Congrats guys, great job! I pledge to go a whole 24 hours (starting now) without pestering the team for web cam support out of deep respect for the awesome amount of stuff you guys have done in a crazy short amount of time. Seriously, working with you guys this year has been a great experience. You're all aces in my book :)

  • The Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight 2 say RC1. Is it still RC1 or was this an oversight? If it is RC1, when is the final expected to be released?

  • Microsoft Silverlight cannot be used in browsers running in 64 bit mode.
    When does Silverlight support browsers running in 64 bit mode?

  • Hi Scott,
    It's great that now we have released version Silverlight , no BETA. I am working on a multiple file uploader, and i amd using WebClient. and using UploadStringAsync to upload my file. and UploadProgressChanged event to show upload progress. But in this release some how UploadProgressChanged is only firing for once. Logiclly it should give me continual progress %. Every thing is working fine apart from this. Need your help.

  • Are there tutorials on how to convert from winforms to silverlight as well as silverlight to winforms?

    We want to develop web and desktop applications ffrom the same code base and just set a target platform of either Silverlight or .NET Winforms. this would greatly help us and we do not mind that a subset of the .NET framework is available in Silverlight.

  • Awesome!
    From today, all our new projects are going to be in SL2.
    All existing websites will be upgraded to use jQuery (actually, we were already using jQuery for most of them before Microsoft officially included it last month).

    Cheers

  • Where can I go to vote for adding support in Silverlight for the WMSP9 codec (WMA Voice)?

  • Scott, what great news to come back from vacation to! Thanks to you and your team for all the hard work!!

  • Thank you very much!
    Question: when can we expect a localized version of Silverlight tools / Blend 2 Sp1?
    Best regards

  • Great work....

  • and now is the time to start developing silverlight applications.but i think that we should wait for next version of visual studio and expression blend don't you think so?

  • What is the link to the "Silverlight Toolkit"? Can you give a list of what controls are in the current release and when the next release is expected?

    This is great news for all .Net developers. Great work by you and your team Scott. This plus the JQuery announcement just show how dedicated you team is to providing what your customers need (aka: developers) and also are willing to embrace open-source when it makes sense.

  • As our development group we were actually waiting for the Silverlight 2.0 to be released.
    I'm hoping to get more productive on the web site using Silverlight.
    Thanks MS :)

  • Hi Scott,
    On tools download page it is mentioned that Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (RC1).
    It is confusing.Is it Release candidate (RC) or Release to market/web (RTM/RTW)

  • Congrats to the SL team, very excited to start working with SL 2.0 and upcoming SL Toolkit.
    One question: I understand SL is a cross-platform browser based technology, but curious to know if there are any plans of providing offline capabilities to SL similar to Adobe AIR?
    Cheers!

  • Hi Scott, great work. Any chance of a roadmap for the up & coming controls?

  • Hello Scott,

    I am Posting this once againg, as i posted this last night also but never found my post in the list. May be something has gone wrong.
    Well, First of all Congrats to you and all other who love and work on silverlight including me, for the final release.
    Secondly, I found a wierd thing. I have developed a simple multi file uploader in beta 2, using UploadStirngAsync, and UploadProgressChanged event, it worked fine. BUt as yesterday it was a final release so i was unable to show demo to my seniors due to version diff. Then i updated my system to meet final release. Now what is happening is, My UploadProgresEvent is not firing more then once. it is keep showing me 0%, second why we only have 50 as the maximum value of Percent change in uploadProgressChange Event.

    Ravi Kant

  • Hello Scott,

    Congratulations for the 2.0 release !
    Is there any news about interactive Silverlight designer for Visual Studio ?

    Thanks

  • When do we get a 64-bit version?

  • Scott! one important question do you think a mix blend of wpf and silver light.. will these be future of desktop application?

  • Scott, there's one thing that has me wondering if I should take the time to learn how to develop Silverlight web sites. What about the issue with RIA-type sites not typically being very discoverable by search engines? Why create a brilliant Silverlight site if the pages and the content on the pages won't come up in web searches? What is the search engine story for Silverlight? Thank you.

  • Sweet! Make room ppl, I'm jumping in the pool!


    Bryan

    Xbox360 + Zune + Vista Media Center = I'm a PC!

  • Excellent

    Now when can we expect the first of the Controls ToolBoxes to appear ? - I assume that each Toolbox release will include both VS and Blend Support ?
    Is there some kind of roadmap for future controls - it is important to know which controls we will get for free, and those that that we will have to develop or buy.

  • How do I turn on Intellisense in the lastest build of Blend 2?

  • Wondered what happened to the WatermarkTextBox in 2.0, not necessary but nice

  • Does it still crash FireFox 3? I had to uninstall it as websites would crash FF3 when I browsed to them.. If it doesn't work, then I will skip it over again until MS fixes it..

  • "The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework".

    Yeah tell that to the WPF people who tries to use the awesome VisualStateManager. It's NOT THERE! (although rumor has it that you are working on adding it to WPF)
    Even when you avoid the VSM, you (currently) need a lot of compiler conditionals to get the same code to compile for both platforms.

  • Microsoft released RC0 to give a little room for those developers to migrate their apps to RTW in advance.
    Strangely enough, Microsoft Silverlight Streaming is not working with RTW version.
    What's going on;;;;

  • So does it still crash FireFox 3?

  • For a MSFT programmer, is there a release dead line?
    If can't meet the date, will you work overtime (to 11PM or 12PM or...)??
    Just curious!

  • after waiting long , released , thank you scott.

  • Installing Silverlight tools for VS 2008 offline is very annoying
    I have some system where i have no internet connectivity and have to install it for letting developers start paying with it.But it really unfortuante to found out that it can't be installed with this.There should a build available with Silverlight runtime included.
    I know a workaround http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/09/29/install-silverlight-2-rc0-offline.aspx but it really is for annoying.
    Please do something about it.
    Thanks
    Kamran Shahid

  • I have a quick Question i'm building a silverlight app that's going to work on a touch screen monitor and need to build a keyboard on screen now i can do it the hard way which is foreach button have a function that adds a letter to the screen but that is long and boring i was hoping to do it with one method and just pass in a command arg but the silverlight button doesn't have that do you have any idea scott?

    thanks btw watched you at brighton remix 08

  • Scott, please stop using the word "rich". It's overuse has almost no application as a Microsoft adjective now.

  • Scott,

    Your way of writing really helped me to understand lots of ASP.NET MVC and other topics,
    But, I am desperately waiting for some article by you, with Silverlight integration with MVC,

    Thanks
    Brij Mohan

  • Silverlight 2.0 released

  • It would be very nice to have the ability to render controls to bitmaps in Silverlight, as in WPF.

  • Can Silverlight 2 be viewed in Mac OS X or Linux?

  • when will I be bale to develop on systems like OpenBSD or FreeBSD?
    and how would I be bale to install plugins for mozilla on such systems?!

  • Does "cross platform" mean "works on all versions of Windows" or is there a runtime for Linux?

  • Interoperability:

    Does this NEW latest Silverlight 2 runs on LINUX based system ?

  • Hey!

    Wtf is cross platform?

    Does it work on all platforms? Even BSD?

  • released..yes...but will take a little time to get acquainted for business web site usage

  • Is there a unit testing framework available for this release?

  • It crashes FireFox 3 - will that be fixed any time soon?

  • Scott, I had the Silverlight 2 Beta installed, and it was working great in both IE7 and FF3 -- as soon as I saw the final release I downloaded and installed it.

    Now, whenever I go to a Silverlight page in IE7 (WinXP SP2), it pops up the badge telling me to install Silverlight. It still works fine in FF3, however.

    I've tried uninstalling, rebooting, reinstalling, etc. No matter what I do, it still won't work in IE7.

    Any thoughts?

  • Good stuff guys. And to Scott, make sure you're boys/girls head to the silverlight.net forums to give a hand, we have lost of questions that need answered. Especially me :)

    p.s. Bit overcrowded with pingbacks in here methinks. Every time I come to this blog I facepalm with all the pingbacks.

  • Hello Scott,
    I am really happy to see the added support for Server Side Playlists for windows media streaming videos. But it seems like forward/rewind does not work with SSPL. Is that true?

    Thanks.

  • Hi Scott,

    Can you please help me i am following your Digg sample tutorial for silverlight:
    but i cant get past the tutorial part 3? there seems to be an exception:

    "the remote server returned an Error: Not Found"

    get the following error when i try to do the download under the following:

    under the following Topic in tutorial 3 of your blogg i have attache a screen shot as well and displayed the error using a second textbox
    Using System.Net.WebClient to Asynchronously Call the Digg REST Feed

    This is my code as stated by your tutorial please notice i use another textbox(txtblkTodo) at to display the exception error i get within the
    DiggService_DownloadStringCompleted() method :

    private void SearchBtn_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
    // Retrieve Topic to Search for from WaterMarkTextBox
    string topic = txtSearchTopic.Text;
    //txtSearchTopic.Text += 'Searching';
    // Construct Digg REST URL
    string diggUrl = String.Format('http://services.digg.com/stories/topic/{0}?count=20&appkey=http%3A%2F%2Fscottgu.com', topic);
    // Initiate Async Network call to Digg
    WebClient diggService = new WebClient();
    diggService.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(DiggService_DownloadStringCompleted);
    diggService.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(diggUrl));
    }

    private void DiggService_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender, DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)
    {
    if (e.Error == null)
    {
    string result = e.Result;
    //Todo: Do Something with the XML
    }

    Display the exception:
    txtblkTodo.Text = 'e.Error.Message****: ' + e.Error.Message +
    'e.Error.InnerException****: ' + e.Error.InnerException +
    'e.Error.StackTrace****: ' + e.Error.StackTrace +
    'e.Error.GetBaseException****: ' + e.Error.GetBaseException();

    }

    when i download the sample it works fine but when i follow the tutorial part 1 and 2 are easy but part 3:
    Using System.Net.WebClient to Asynchronously Call the Digg REST Feed
    just does not work I painstakingly made sure both codes (in your Sample and the one i have hand-coded) as identical down to the referenced assemblies and still when i type in "programming" or "basketball" to retrieve the data in mines i get the stupid exception as mentioned above but when i do thesampe thing in your sample i downloaded it works! why is this? i even deleted all the other files and code just to make sure my code and your code are the the same still i get the same error, this is quite frustrating can you please help????

  • Hi Scott,

    Can you please help me i am following your Digg sample tutorial for silverlight:
    but i cant get past the tutorial part 3? there seems to be an exception:

    "the remote server returned an Error: Not Found"

    get the following error when i try to do the download under the following:

    under the following Topic in tutorial 3 of your blogg i have attache a screen shot as well and displayed the error using a second textbox
    Using System.Net.WebClient to Asynchronously Call the Digg REST Feed

    This is my code as stated by your tutorial please notice i use another textbox(txtblkTodo) at to display the exception error i get within the
    DiggService_DownloadStringCompleted() method :

    private void SearchBtn_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
    // Retrieve Topic to Search for from WaterMarkTextBox
    string topic = txtSearchTopic.Text;
    //txtSearchTopic.Text += 'Searching';
    // Construct Digg REST URL
    string diggUrl = String.Format('http://services.digg.com/stories/topic/{0}?count=20&appkey=http%3A%2F%2Fscottgu.com', topic);
    // Initiate Async Network call to Digg
    WebClient diggService = new WebClient();
    diggService.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(DiggService_DownloadStringCompleted);
    diggService.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(diggUrl));
    }

    private void DiggService_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender, DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)
    {
    if (e.Error == null)
    {
    string result = e.Result;
    //Todo: Do Something with the XML
    }

    Display the exception:
    txtblkTodo.Text = 'e.Error.Message****: ' + e.Error.Message +
    'e.Error.InnerException****: ' + e.Error.InnerException +
    'e.Error.StackTrace****: ' + e.Error.StackTrace +
    'e.Error.GetBaseException****: ' + e.Error.GetBaseException();

    }

    when i download the sample it works fine but when i follow the tutorial part 1 and 2 are easy but part 3:
    Using System.Net.WebClient to Asynchronously Call the Digg REST Feed
    just does not work I painstakingly made sure both codes (in your Sample and the one i have hand-coded) as identical down to the referenced assemblies and still when i type in "programming" or "basketball" to retrieve the data in mines i get the stupid exception as mentioned above but when i do thesampe thing in your sample i downloaded it works! why is this? i even deleted all the other files and code just to make sure my code and your code are the the same still i get the same error, this is quite frustrating can you please help????

  • Hello Scott,
    You were writing about the upcoming silverlight toolkit with a lot of controls in it. when will be the first release of the toolkit?

    thanks for your tutorial, it was very helpful.
    greets dave

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