Silverlight 2 Release date set for 14 October 2008….. Released!
One of the most frequently asked questions by developers to Microsoft employees this past year, has probably been: “When will Silverlight 2 be released?”
Microsoft was very “secretive” about when Silverlight 2 will be released, but they’ve FINALLY made an announcement as to when we can expect SL RTW. According to this letter, Microsoft will be releasing Silverlight to the public on 14 October 2008. Yes. That’s correct! Not 27 October as anticipated, but today!
Old installations will automatically be updated (with default setting) to the new version as soon as this version will become available.
Oh man! I just refreshed http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ and noted that SL was released while busy writing this post. Great news!
If you’ve previously installed Silverlight RC0 and the development tools, you will note that you cannot install Silverlight 2 RTW (Release To Web) if you didn’t update the developer tools first. An update of the developer tools, called “Microsoft Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2007 SP1 (RC1)” can be found here. This update will install:
- Silverlight 2 Developer runtime
- Silverlight 2 Software Development Kit (SDK)
- KB956453 for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and
- Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
The Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes the following:
- Visual Basic and C# Project templates
- Intellisense and code generators for XAML
- XAML design preview
- Debugging of Silverlight applications
- Remote debugging of Silverlight applications for Mac
- Web reference support
- WCF Templates
- Team Build and command line build support
- Integration with Expression Blend
Before you install this update, make sure to uninstall any previous versions of Expression Blend, and be sure to have Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installed prior to installing this update.
So? What has changed from RC0 to RTW? Well, as far as I could find out,
- Only bugs were fixed from RC0 to RTW. No API changes has been made.
- Google Chrome also currently supports Silverlight in their developer release. Here’s how to enable Silverlight for Chrome developer release.
You can listen to Scott Guthrie’s teleconference about Silverlight here and read more about it on http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx.
Something else worth looking at is this page. You can find the Silverlight fact sheet also on this page. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/silverlight/default.mspx
