Via ScottGu, the Silverlight 2 Release Candidate is now available for download.
Low-lights:
- No new go-live license for until the final version is released (the RC Silverlight binaries won’t be made available to the general public)
- It has some breaking changes for code (details here).
- No RTF control (one can dream …
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High-lights:
- The layout system in Silverlight has been modified to round final measure and arrange values to integers when placing elements on the screen (“pixel snapping”). The result is crisper lines, more consistent rendering look, and fewer rendering artifacts.
Layout rounding will be *on* by default, but there is a new inherited property on UIElement called UseLayoutRounding that can be set to false if the old layout behavior is desired.
Note It is possible that this change will affect how your animations render, in which case you might want to set UseLayoutRounding to false.
Note This change does not affect transforms. If you apply a transform to an element, it may still be rendered at a sub-pixel location. What this means is that the fuzzy anti-aliased look of the old version should finally be gone — and instead you’ll get crisper text/lines/everything without resorting to pixel snapping transform hacks. - Combo-box
- Password text box
- Better looking default skins.
The big question — will it get the adoption rate needed by web companies and ISVs in order to make it a viable platform? (I wonder if it will be installed by default on a Windows 7 box?)
Flash 10 and the associated tools look really good … Blend (and Silverlight) is years behind. I love the new simple 3D features of Flash CS4 Professional.
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I think it’s wrong to say SL is “years behind” flash/flex – there may be some missing UI elements the flex has over SL, but having experience in using flex for more than a website game and using it as a corporate lob app has shown huge holes in flex’s capabilities (and that adobe still has features in flash that require you to buy adobe servers to get).
I think people want to compare flex and SL head-to-head because they both “run in a square”, but I think as time goes on it will become clear that they are suited for completely different roles