Shortly after Silverlight 2 was out for development pleasures, we asked for a lot of things from Silverlight team. I myself asked for several features that I thought were most needed for killer applications. Hundreds of Silverlight developers joined in and wished for a trillion of features more. Then I was highly doubt that Silverlight team would deliver all of those, because it was like a million children sending wish letters to Santa Claus. And guess what, they have done it! They have delivered most of the requested features and then some right in Silverlight 3 Beta which is now available for download.

What’s New in Silverlight 3? More controls, support for more media codecs, perspective 3D, pixel shader APIs, animation effects, GPU 3D acceleration, text improvements, element-to-element binding, LocalConnection API, SaveFileDialog, assembly caching, network monitoring API, out-of-browser detachment, standalone desktop application, .NET RIA services, binary XML and additional features, too many to list them all in one post. I'm going to write more detail samples and demos in the upcoming days. Meanwhile, Tim Heuer has more in his blog post A guide to Silverlight 3 new features.

Downloads

Silverlight 3 Beta Tools for Visual Studio - Includes everything from SDK, project templates to developer runtime for Visual Studio user.
Silverlight 3 Beta Developer Runtimes - Windows or Mac.
Silverlight Toolkit - Extra controls.
Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Preview
Silverlight 3 Beta Documentations - Online or Offline (CHM File).