Tuesday, October 14, 2008

The wait is (finally) over, Silverlight 2 released

While we were getting ready for Day 2 of DevReach here in Bulgaria earlier today, Microsoft finally got around to releasing one of its most highly anticipated new technologies in years, Silverlight 2.0. By now, there is little new I can tell you about Silverlight, so be sure to review all of my posts on this technology that have been accumulating for the last couple of years. There you'll find all the info you need to get started with Silverlight 2.0. But if you're new Telerik Watch and Silverlight, let me just summarize quickly: the most significant change in Silverlight 2.0 (from 1.0) is the addition of cross-browser, cross-platform .NET.

As far as timing goes, Silverlight 2.0 is shipping a little later than Microsoft had originally (publicly) planned, and with fewer features, too. The sophomore plug-in is delivering much of what application developers need to start doing "real" development in Silverlight, but there is still much work to be done to make Silverlight a productive LOB platform. With Silverlight 2 now behind us, it's time to start addressing those "gaps" (such as offline application support and increased access to system resources) and looking forward to Silverlight 3.0!
But I'm probably getting a little ahead. Right now we can celebrate the "official" arrival of the 2.0 plug-in and start doing some "real" Silverlight development. And with the plug-in official, what do you think of Silverlight 2.0? Is this the milestone you were waiting for to start using Silverlight or do you still need more?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now we can call it Silverlight 2.0 ? or Silverlight 2 (without .0)

I know my question is not very interesting but hey :)

Todd Anglin said...

@Gregory- Hopefully we can soon just refer to it as "Silverlight" and forget the version number altogether! For now though, "2" or "2.0" are acceptable. When I do talks, though, I just call it "Silverlight" these days.

Anonymous said...

I thought there will be Silverlight control property panel in VS2008 for final version, if someone knows when this will be available or maybe an addon for this feature.

Or maybe my VS got a problem, I don't know.

Anonymous said...

“We are working on an interactive Silverlight designer for Visual Studio - but it isn’t ready to ship just yet. Instead we have the Silverlight XAML source editor with design-time preview inside VS 2008 right now. In the future we’ll be enable the WYSIWYG interactiveness as well.

Hope this helps,

Scott”

Ouch !

Anonymous said...

How about an update on when Telerik will release their controls for the final version?

Anonymous said...

anonymous : It is already out (in Client.net) , RadControls for Silverlight 2 Q3 2008 RC1 for Silverlight 2 RTW.