Microsoft announced that Silverlight 2 will be released to manufacturing and available for download on Tuesday, October 14th.
This release comes after an extended beta period. Upgrading from Silverlight 2 RC0 should be painless, as there are no breaking changes. End users should be upgraded to the new version of the client automatically. Upgrading your development environment should require simply uninstalling the RC0 version of the runtime, SDK, and tools, and then installing the new versions. Upgrading from Silverlight Beta 2 will require some code changes.
Over Silverlight 1.x, Silverlight 2 offers many enhancements:
- .NET Framework support with a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework.
- Built-in controls, including DataGrid, ListBox, Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar controls and more.
- Skinning and templating support.
- Deep zoom, enabling greater interactivity and navigation of ultrahigh resolution imagery.
- Greater networking support. Out-of-the-box support allows calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS and standard HTTP services.
- Expanded .NET Framework language support, including Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby.
- Content protection, including Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady.
- Improved server scalability and expanded advertiser support, including new streaming and progressive download capabilities, superior search engine optimization techniques, and in-stream advertising support
MS has also announced that it will release the Silverlight Control Pack under the Microsoft Permissive License, an Open Source Initiative-approved license. The SCP includes controls such as DockPanel, ViewBox, TreeView, Accordion and AutoComplete.
MS also intends to publish the technical specification for the Silverlight Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) vocabulary on MSDN under the Open Specification Promise (OSP).