I have been eagerly waiting for the final release of Silverlight 2. And now it is here before the schedule. Kudos to Silverlight team.

There are a few things on my wish list that are not yet here though:

1. Unrestricted outbound socket communication, where the policy file is not needed, and port range extended to cover FTP, SMTP, POP and other important ports. This will allow developers to create serious Silverlight applications and to beat Flash hand downs.
2. Bitmap drawing and rendering, so that we can develop face recognition, photo editing, and other drawing-related software. Our developers desperately need this to create a Logo and Button Generator in Silverlight. Some customers want to get some cool effects off Bitmap Pixel Shading too.
3. Non-blurry text. It is quite distracting to read text in Silverlight application, since it's all blurry. The anti-aliasing is too much. The problem is rooted down to WPF, more specifically in the way it renders text to favor positioning accuracy over legibility. More info
4. Support for Khmer language. This is a bit personal, since I'm a Cambodian and would like to see some progress for Cambodia IT, as it is stuck between the incompatibilities and supports. Unicode has finalized the Khmer characters standard years ago, and Vista has officially supported it. But .NET, WPF and Silverlight don't render Khmer text correctly, as these technologies don't go well with the Microsoft Uniscribe Engine and GDI+. More info

Hopefully these things got off my wish list some day (by actual implementations). Anyhow, today is a milestone for Silverlight. The web landscape will be changed forever.

Silverlight team has made it finally. Silverlight 2, SDK and runtimes are now available for download.

Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008

Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime (Windows)

Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime (Mac)

Silverlight 2 SDK offline documentation (CHM)

Expression Blend 2 SP1  

Here is the full press release from Microsoft:

Microsoft has just released the Silverlight 2.0 RC0. Unlike the Beta 2 release, Release Candidate 0 is intended for developers only. It could be used to ensure that current Beta 2 applications will be compatible with Silverlight 2 full version. Accoding to Scott Guthrie, a ship load of bugs have been fixed, blocks of code have been heavily optimized for performance, yet it also manages to cramp three more controls as bonus: ComboBox, ProgressBar and PasswordBox. More new controls, including TreeView , are expected to come out within the next few months.

Here are some important links:

Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (RC0)

Microsoft Expression Blend 2 SP1 RC Preview

Breaking Changes Since Beta 2

Note that you'll need to uninstall previous Silverlight tools and runtimes in prior to installing new tools.

Finally Silverlight Beta 2 is released with lots of improvements and new features, yet the runtime setup file is about 4.6 MB with core controls included! Amazing! If you're using Visual Studio 2008, download the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 For VS 2008. This package includes everything from SDK, runtime, to VS 2008 projects and add-ins. Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview is also available for download today. It's a must have for designing the UI.

Noticely the web client and socket have the support for cross domain networking. Though it still requires the annoying XML policy file that must be explicitly created on the target servers before the magic happens. Scott Guthrie has more about the new features.

If you read my recent article "How to Get Files From Resources in Silverlight 2.0", you'll see that loading a file embedded as resource takes only a few lines of code. You also have to remember the formats of the URI. Well, that is going to change today, because now you'll need to write just a single line of developer-friendly code.More...

Questions like "How to load an embedded bitmap programmatically?" appear in Silverlight.net forum every single day, and some people actually think it is impossible to do such thing in Silverlight 2.0. Well, the truth is that not only is it possible but it is also damn easy.More...

I think the competition in Silverlight Controls market will be fierce. Just under a few months, developers have created a handful of UI controls for Silverlight 2.0 already. Well, some like VectorLight provides it for free with full source code (maybe for now?). The VectorLight's controls set include Calendar, Dropdown List, Fieldset, ListBox, Textbox, TextArea, Tree View, Progress Bar, and Text Label.

VectorLight Controls Demo 

As expected, Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 was released hours ago, and it comes with Socket Networking support. Silverlight applications can now make direct/persistent connections to remote server. There are however some restrictions:

• Supports only TCP.
  
• Connect to only site or host of origin. (Temporary restriction until future release of Silverlight 2.0)
• Connect to only port range of 4502-4532.

Like I told you guys over the past few weeks, Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 was to be released on March 05. Yes, confirmed! Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1.0 run-time binaries, SDK, source code and documentation are now available for download. Thanks to coolio for his compilation of links.

If you're developing Silverlight applications in Visual Studio 2008, you should download Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for VS2008 and Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview.

Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 (This package contains VS2008 add-on, run-time binaries,  SDK, documentation and samples)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0bae58e-9c0b-4090-a1db-f134d9f095fd&DisplayLang=en

Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=32a3e916-e681-4955-bc9f-cfba49273c7c&DisplayLang=en 

SDK:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4e03409a-77f3-413f-b108-1243c243c4fe&DisplayLang=en

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 runtime for Windows:
http://silverlight.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/6/6/3/663404e9-990d-4b74-873c-c4611aea2133/Silverlight.2.0.exe

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 runtime for Mac OS X:
http://www.microsoft.com/Silverlight/handlers/getSilverlight.ashx?v=2.0&targetplatform=macintel

Controls Source Code:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ea93dd89-3af2-4acb-9cf4-bfe01b3f02d4&DisplayLang=en

Documentation:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1840cab5-196c-4264-b55d-562242a72625&DisplayLang=en  

Online documentation:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404700.aspx 

Notes

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 is not compatible with Silverlight 1.1. Therefore, you might have to uninstall the following components first before installing that of Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1:

• Previous version of Silverlight runtime.
• Previous version of Silverlight SDK.
• Previous version of Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio.
  
• Visual Studio Update KB949325
  

Enjoys!

Scott Guthrie just blogged about the Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview minutes ago. Expression Blend 2.5, which adds support for new Silverlight controls, is to be released as a free preview at the same time Silverlight 2 Beta 1 goes public. You should take a take look at his blog post for details.

In case you missed the recent Scott Guthrie's blog post on Silverlight 2.0, there are going to be some cool developments in Silverlight 2.0 Beta1, which is to be released before March 05 2008. I like the fact that direct socket networking is supported. Better yet, cross-domain access is also supported. These two features alone will allow Silverlight developers to create rich Client-Server applications. Basically, a Silverlight 2.0 application will get the privileges of what a desktop application has, in terms of networking. Creating live chatting application in Silverlight is now possible, so are stock trading terminal, remote desktop client, multi-player game, grid computing client,  FTP client, streaming real-time chart, etc. With the help of new 'local storage' support, creating a full-featured BitTorrent P2P client might be a reality. And yes, those new built-in controls will help us create UI applications much quicker. Isn't this super exciting? 

Scott mentioned many other things:More...

On January 17 2008, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of .NET Framework Source Code under read-only reference for debugging purposes. That was great news indeed for .NET developers especially for those who had used .NET Reflector. This will solve a lot of debugging mysteries behind the "[External Code]" in the call stack. But hold on a sec, there is greater news for Silverlight developers, the source code of Silverlight libraries will be available as well according to his reply to our comment. I asked him if Silverlight source code could be opened. "Yes - we'll be releasing the source and enabling debugging for the Silverlight libraries as well once they ship." he replied. Although his reply is not an official announcement, it significantly leverages the possibility of having Silverlight source released.More...

Silverlight 2.0 Alpha introduced OpenFileDialog control which allows Silverlight applications to open and read *local* files outside Isolated Storage. It's better than the HTML <input> tag which is widely used for uploading files in web page. Well, like HTML <input>, OpenFileDialog could be used to build a file uploader quickly. Both must prompt user to select files. But unlike HTML <input>, OpenFileDialog control could be used to read and process the file data locally in Silverlight application. This is pretty powerful since Silverlight application will not need to upload the files to server for processing. What's more is that OpenFileDialog allows user to select multiple files at once. No need to create multiple instances of OpenFileDialog for that. Let's see some examples:More...

So you want your Silverlight video player to play in full screen? No problem! It's pretty easy to go into full screen mode, hiding everything including browser frame, in Silverlight. It's just a line of code:

Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen = True 

While in full screen mode, user can press ESC key to exit full-screen mode, or your Silverlight application can exit programatically by:

Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen = False

You can easily toggle between full screen modes by:

VB.NET
Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen = Not Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen

C#
Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen = !Application.Host.Content.IsFullScreen;

The Content class exposes two events FullScreenChanged() which fires when the full screen mode is changed, and Resized() event which fires when the host element is resized (not when browser is resized). You can use these events to detect when user gets into and out of full screen mode. It's also worth mentioning that all keyboard events will not fire in full screen mode, only mouse events will. This feature is to protect user from password spoofing and other impersonation attacks.

View Online Demo - Download Source Code (14.34 kb)

Folks, the Olympics 2008 Games in Beijing, China is coming soon on 08/08/08. Sports aside, the most exciting news to me is in fact the deal between Microsoft and NBC to broadcast the Olympics games over the web via Silverlight 2.0. Over 3000 hours of live and on-demand videos will be available exclusively to anyone with Silverlight 2.0 plug-in installed. In layman's terms, you can watch every second of all the games if you have Silverlight 2.0. For more details, read the blog post by Soma Segar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division.

Now let's talk business. Thousands if not millions of people will download and install Silverlight 2.0 plugin. This will definitely bring the "98% of web users can run Flash Silverlight applications" closer to reality. We Silverlight developers would be able to deploy our Java Silverlight applications worry-free over the web, because 98% of all web users could use them right away. And Microsoft might not have to deal with antitrust lawsuits, because they wouldn't need to distribute Silverlight in the automatic Windows Update.

I'll definitely keep an eye on NBCOlympics.com for videos of the Olympics.