News

Silverlight 2.0 Release Candidate Available

Release Candidate 0 (RC0) Developer Runtime edition is now available for download.

Microsoft's closely watched Silverlight 2.0 cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in-based on Microsoft's .NET Framework, which developers can use to create Web-based applications-has passed its latest milestone: Release Candidate 0 (RC0) Developer Runtime edition is now available for download.

The new RC0 runtime is strictly designed for developers and will help them get their apps in working order by time of the product's final release, according to a blog post by Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division. The regular end-user product that plugs into the browser is still at the Silverlight 2.0 beta 2 stage.

Making Web Apps Easy
Guthrie didn't say when Microsoft will issue the official product release, but there have been reports that it could happen at any time this month. Microsoft released the RC0 runtime to provide the closest functionality to the real thing with the aim of getting final feedback and bug fixes. However, RC0 does include some new features, including three new controls -- ComboBox, PasswordBox and ProgressBar -- that Guthrie demonstrated in his blog post.

The final release of Silverlight will feature improved "default control template skins" and developers will be able to tweak them using Microsoft Expression Blend.

Guthrie stressed that Silverlight is suited for simplified Web app customization.

Scott Guthrie Quote

"This goes beyond simple styling of colors and fonts -- you can literally completely change the visual UI of a control, as well as customize its behavior (for example: add animation) without writing any code," he wrote.

Both Mac and PC versions of Silverlight RC0 can be downloaded, along with associated Visual Studio tools and the latest Expression Blend UI-design tool. To use RC0, developers first have to install Service Pack 1 of Expression Blend 2.0.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

    New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.

  • Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.

  • VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

    The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.

  • Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

    "Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."

  • Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

    Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events