Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available

This morning, Microsoft announced the release of the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2 prior to shipping next month.

So what’s changed?

1) API Updates

There’s loads of little bug fixes in the core API’s designed to fix the differences between Silverlight and the full .NET framework.  There has also been a load of performance improvements made throughout the runtime.  There has also been some style updates made.

2) New Controls

Three new major controls have been added: PasswordBox, ComboBox and ProgressBar. You can see the appearence of these here:

3) New Control Skins

The final release of Silverlight 2 will have a much more polished set of default control template skins than those that were in Beta1 and Beta2.  The goal with the default control templates is to have a look that is professional and attractive, can be used in the majority of applications as-is (without requiring you to author custom style templates), and which is also easily tweakable using Expression Blend.

Today’s RC build has skins that are close to the final look Microsoft plan to ship.  Below is the default look for the DataGrid, RadioButton, CheckBoxes, and the DatePicker controls with today’s RC build:

Previous releases of Silverlight often rendered graphics on sub-pixel locations – which could cause lines and shapes to sometimes appear “fuzzy”.  The RC of Silverlight has a new features called “layout rounding” that causes the layout system to round the final measure of a control to an integer (“pixel snapping”), which results in crisper lines and fewer rendering artifacts.  This feature is now on by default, and helps make applications look nicer.

The final release of Silverlight is not that far off now.  It has been a pretty amazing project that has come a long way in a pretty short amount of time.  For the full low-down on what’s new in this release, please take a look at here.  We can’t wait.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 26 Sep 2008