Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 release

Ladies and Gentlemen!

They waited.
Our colleagues from Redmond report a joyful news for developers of RIA-applications on .NET - Silverlight 2.0 is coming out on October 14th. The official document can be read here .
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For those who are interested in the possibilities of technology, I will give the designated list of the main features.

So:

• Support for a rich set of .NET base classes. Silverlight is a subset of the “regular”, full .NET Framework latest version.
• Powerful and functional built-in controls. These include DataGrid, ListBox, Slider, ScrollViewer, calendar controls and more.
• Advanced support for skins and templates. This gives the flexibility to customize the look of the application and its individual elements.
• Technology DeepZoom. This technology allows you to create "multi-layered" images using ultra-high-resolution images.
• Powerful and diverse support for network communications protocols. Directly “out-of-the-box” we get full support for REST, WS * / SOAP, POX, RSS and standard HTTP services (for those who do not know, WCF really “can do anything”), which allows developers to create easily integrable applications with existing back-end systems using heterogeneous formats.
• Extended language support for the .NET Framework. Unlike other runtimes, Silverlight 2 supports a whole bunch of programming languages ​​supported by CLR (Visual Basic, C #) and DLR (JavaScript, IronPython, IronRuby), which allows developers to use existing knowledge and skills to work with these languages ​​on other platforms .
• Advanced content protection system. This includes Silverlight DRM, which uses PlayReady access control technology, which helps protect content used in applications.
• Improved server scaling and advertiser support. This includes streaming content, download capabilities, improved search optimization techniques, and support for streaming content advertising technologies.
• Broad ecosystem of partners. A network of partner companies such as ComponentOne, Infragistics and Telerik Inc. they are already offering a lot of products that will bring development of Silverlight applications in Visual Studio to an even higher level.
• Cross-platform and cross-browser. This means support for Mac, Windows and Linux as an OS, as well as Firefox, Safari and IE as browsers.

Download Silverlight 2.0 will be here .

PS By the way, the open-source tool for SL-development is also announced - the Soyatec project