Silverlight 2 Release Guide
As promised, Silverlight 2 is now not merely released, it is really and most sincerely released…
If You Are A New Silverlight Programmer
If you are taking this occasion to become a Silverlight programmer, welcome! Everything you need is here on the Get Started Page. I suggest you follow this order: download and install the areas marked (1), (2) in the upper left corner, then skip down to Start Learning and read (1) Next mix (4) and (5) together and leaven with (2) and (3) as appropriate. By the time you finish, we'll have a lot more for you and if you have questions, you'll get quick answers on the forum
If you are already a Silverlight Programmer
1. All your Beta code just broke. With luck, you were using the RC0 release and you have non-Beta code standing by ready to drop in. Now's the time to do it. If not, now's the time to get the new tools and update.
2. What you need to start coding in Silverlight 2 – While there is quite a bit you can download, all you need is
- Visual Studio SP1 or Visual Web Designer Express SP1
- Silverlight Tools For Visual Studio
- Microsoft Blend 2 Service Pack 1
- Mac Runtime [optional]
The combination of Blend 2 + Blend 2 SP1 is the updated Blend 2.5, and the Silverlight Tools + either VS SP1 or VWD SP1 is the complete Silverlight Development environment + the SDK + the documentation + the developer runtime + the debugger + the ASP.NET Server controls + the Project templates!
3. This is the last time Silverlight will not be backwards incompatible – from now on when we update, your code should continue to work. (at least, that's the plan)
4. What's new, what changed?
You'll find a lot of information on this in Scott Gu's Announcement which is very much worth reading. I'll be expanding on this in detail in coming posts, with an emphasis on reviewing the rich controls, and exploring some aspects of the base library such as Linq support, local data caching, network support and enhanced media support.
You'll note that even the familiar controls look more polished; a lot of work went into their final default look – though as many of you know, every Silverlight control is ultimately lookless, subject to templating (skinning).
Silverlight 2 brings the Silverlight Control Pack – with dozens of additional controls, and a promise of new controls being added continually over the next few months leading to a total of over 100. The first control pack will include the TreeView, DockPanel, WrapPanel, ViewBox, Expander, NumericUpDown, AutoComplete and more. Each of these controls will be released with full source code and an OSI license that will give you permission to modify and extend and use the source for any purpose! …. (Sorry, I became disoriented for a moment).
I will be covering each control in the Control Pack as it becomes available. That is one of the areas I'll be focusing on this year and I'll be working closely with the Controls team to make sure you have the complete information as soon as it is available.
Other changes include confirmation of our partnership with Soyatec to sponsor tool development for creating Silverlight apps using the cross platform Eclipse development environment. There is already a brief tutorial on building a Silverlight app with Eclipse available here.
Silverlight 2 adds support for ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria), extended networking support, and new video codecs for high def video. I'll review each of these and more in coming posts and videos.
5. What about the Tutorials and Videos Already Posted
We stayed up late and fixed them all, in most cases leaving the video intact but fixing up the code to ensure it will work fine with Silverlight 2. If you download any code and it won't work, please do let us know; but we've checked so you shouldn't have any problems. The tutorials have had all the code updated, and all the tutorial text has been updated (and look for two versions of the tutorials (one in VB and one in C#) to appear soon. All the code in my recent blog postings has been with RC0 so it should be fine, older blog postings may need a recompile, or even a tiny fix.
6. Breaking Changes
Yes, you want the latest Breaking Changes document, but most developers will find few breaking changes that affect their code (the one that kept hitting me was the changes to Content Presenter – easy to find and to fix) .
7. Subscribe
If you haven't already, I recommend subscribing to three or four Silverlight blogs (or 20!). My personal priority order, to ensure you are up to date is: