Friday, September 26, 2008

Silverlight 2.0 RC0 released, Telerik RC coming next week (update)

In case you missed the news, Microsoft has just released the official Silverlight 2 Release Candidate build, a major step towards getting an official plug-in. Now, by many early accounts, we expected to have a final plug-in around this time, but I think it's clear that Microsoft is saving that release for the upcoming PDC festivities. So, we get an RC instead of an RTM, but according to the great ScottGu, applications built to work with RC0 should be upgradable to RTM with a "few hours" work. Among the highlights of things changed Beta 2 to RC0:

  • Snap-to-pixel rendering by default (SL used to use "sub pixel" rendering). This will help Silverlight applications look "crisper" on screen and finally help improve the readability of the text!
  • More new controls: Combobox, PasswordBox, and ProgressBar
  • Updated default skin- looks much cleaner than the original default skin
And that's about it at surface level. For a complete list of the well over 30 breaking changes in RC0, check out Mike Snow's blog. Most of the changes are small "tweaks," but they may affect your app if you used a lot of the Silverlight API.
As for Telerik, we've got our RC0 bits ready to go. In fact, we were going to release them today, but Microsoft was a little late getting the RC0 plug-in out the door. On Monday, we will be releasing the RadControls for Silverlight 2 RC0, which will not only work on the new plug-in, but also pack some new controls and features (more on those later). And in about 4 weeks, around the time of PDC, we will release the RadControls for Silverlight 2 RC1, followed shortly by the official RadControls for Silverlight with our big Q3 release in early November.
It has been a long road, but Silverlight 2 is finally (almost) here! UPDATE: I got our planned release day for the RadControls for Silverlight RC0 wrong. After the MS delay last week, we decided to add a few more things to RC0, so we need a few extra days to re-test. Look for Telerik RC0 by week's end.

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