Understanding the new features of Silverlight 2 Beta2: ASP Alliance

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Understanding the new features of Silverlight 2 Beta2

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Published: 06 Jun 2008

Unedited - Community Contributed

Abstract
In this article, Scott deeply examines the new features included with the recently released Silverlight 2 Beta 2. After providing a brief overview of the new controls, he provides an overview of the support included for Control Template Editing and Visual State Manager (VSM). Towards the end of the article, he pinpoints some of the new features such as DeepZoom, Adaptive Streaming, Content Protection, and Server Side Playlists. You will also learn the improvements included for Networking and Data such as Cross Domain Sockets, Background Thread, Duplex Communication, Web Services, JSON, DataGrid, DataBinding, and Isolated Storage in addition to a brief discussion of compatibility between Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2 Beta 1.

by Scott Guthrie
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Article Contents:

Introduction

Republished with Permission - Original Article

Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released recently. You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here.

Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine. It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines. These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release.

Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out. But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now.

You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads. You can download both of them here. The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release.