Somasegar was on-stage today at TechEd and announced that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is going to be released with a GoLive license this week. This also will include a Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview and tools to VS2008. I’m looking forward to getting the bits this week and working them into my Silverlight book!

The good news (for me) is that nothing I have written about in the first few chapters of my book has changed. The better news is that there are a lot of improvements to items that I will be writing about in the book, so I get to take advantage of them and pass them along. I was going to write about how to sort and do tricks with the DataGrid using some code I wrote, but now it looks like it is baked in.

Here are some of the highlights for Silverlight Beta 2 from the session:

  • Deep Zoom:
    • improved event driven notifications
    • new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles
    • new MultiScaleTileSource
  • UI Framework
    • more WPF UI features now in Silverlight
    • enhanced
      • animation
      • error handling
      • automation and accessibility
      • keyboard input
      • performance
  • Networking Support
    • Improved Cross Domain support
    • Security enhancements
    • Upload support via WebClient
    • LINQ-to-JSON is now included (formerly a prototype)
    • ADO.NET Data Services support (aka Astoria)
    • Improved SOAP support
  • Rich Controls
    • Visual State Manager
      • New and easier templating model
    • New TabControl
    • TextBox
      • text wrapping
      • scrollbars
    • DataGrid
      • Autosize
      • Reorder
      • Sort