Silverlight 2 released and available: New controls, tools

Microsoft follows up on their announcement yesterday and releases Silverlight 2 today.

You’ll find everything on the official Silverlight site, but I’ll post all the links for your convience here:

Silverlight tools for Visual Studio 2008
Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime (Windows)
Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime (Mac)
Silverlight 2 SDK - Offline documentation (CHM)
Blend 2 SP1

If you are using the Visual Web Developer Express 2008 edition, the Silverlight tools works fine with these as well. That is really neat, you can do Silverlight development without having to fork out any money!

Did you know that you can do Silverlight development in Eclipse?  Microsoft is funding a project to provide this. They’ve partnered up with Soyatec to provide the Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight.

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There are some breaking changes between the beta versions and the release, have a look at the following document for these changes here.

Tim Heuer also have a great post with all the changes and how to get started with development and a quick overview of the breaking changes in Silverlight and in Blend2 SP1, here.