I am extremely exited to help promote Tim Heuer’s post on the release of Silverlight 2, RC0. Tim has done an excellent job describing exactly what this release means to the developer community and end users, so check it out here:
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/09/25/silveright-rc0-released-for-developers.aspx
Summary
For anyone who just wants a summary of Tim’s post here are the points I think are the most important to communicate:
- This release is for DEVELOPERS ONLY
- The intent is to get DEVELOPERS debugging their code against this build before the final “consumer ready” version of the runtime is released to the public.
- Do NOT update your applications in production to use this version of SL2 yet, but start testing with it
- Be sure to read the Breaking Changes document to understand what has changed since Beta 2
- Three new controls come with this release: ProgressBar, PasswordBox and ComboBox
Only Three New Controls?
If you are like me you really want Microsoft to help provide more Controls for Silverlight. Things like a TreeView are a must, and who wants to build it themselves? Tim reminds us in his blog post to have no fear as Shawn Burke’s and others are working on more controls to be released (in preview version) around PDC next month in Oct. For more info, see this Shawn’s post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/09/17/control-freak.aspx
Here is a quick summary of just some of the Silverlight 2 controls the team is working on:
- DockPanel
- WrapPanel
- ViewBox
- Label
- HeaderedContentControl
- Expander
- TreeView
- NumericUpDown
- AutoComplete
- Accordion
Resources
Here is everything you need to get started with SL2 RC0