At MIX08 Microsoft announced the releases of Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and the tools suite for VS2008.
The download for the plug in is around 4 MB for SL 2, and over 54MB for the tools.
Tools can be found here and the Silverlight plug-in can be downloaded from here
If you want to get into it I reckon a good place to start will be in http://silverlight.net/Learn/ where you can find tutorials and labs!? MSDN articles are a bit rough but useful.
Source code for the controls and Unit tests were also released and can be found here
Also it was announced the release of Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview, which you will need if you want to play around with the labs in the learn section.
Heard in dot.rocks about the Telerik RadControls for Silverlight controls, you can have a look at their work in progress here
I haven't played with Silverlight at all just yet but I been following what's coming out of Redmond through ScottGu and his blog. He published a number of tutorials that I'm eager to have a closer look now that I installed the tools.
I wonder what impact this is going to have on the web?
Lots of controls out of the box..
I also had to create a simple HelloWorld type page. And I have to admit it looks cool.
The XAML...
My name is Juan and I work as a Software Developer in Sydney specialising in ASP.net solutions. 
2 comments:
Any thoughts on how much commonality there is between WPF and Silverlight? Obvioulsy both XAML driven but I wonder about the divergence of the two in terms of web versus client based.
I haven't done any work with WPF yet, so I can't answer your question fully yet. :-)
Layout is almost the same, in Silverlight you have StackPanel, Grid and Canvas while in WPF you have a few more options ( the above three + DockPanel and WrapPanel)
There are more controls in WPF than there are in Silverlight. But the basic controls are in both.
For Silverlight apps all you need is the 4MB plug in, while for WPF you need the .Net 3.0 or later installed.
WPF supports rich animations, has a 3D engine that can use your graphics card.
WPF applications of course can levarage all the goodies form your OS, Office integration, peripheral access etc.
The support in VS2008 for WPF is quite extensive, you can use the designer to create controls etc, while for Silverlight at best you have to drag and drop the controls into the XAML. In WPF you drop them in the form and can work take it from there.
I'm not too sure about Databinding just yet, for the Silverlight app that Im building at the moment I get all my data from WCF WebServices.
Silverlight for example does not support LinqToSql. It does support LinqToXml though...
In conclusion WPF lets your build much richer apps, Silverlight 2.0 is a subset of WPF but I think it will bring more and more people to WPF.
Good FAQ here..
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/overview/faq.aspx
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