Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Is Here!

Get it from http://silverlight.net/GetStarted, along with the developer tools, documentation and the June update to Blend 2.5.

Lots of new goodies – as ever, Scott Guthrie’s blog has a comprehensive guide. I’m not going to try and compete with him today: my family tell me it’s time for the weekend to start!

If you’re looking for something to try out, there’s an updated version of Hard Rock’s Memorabilia site, but the really cool new site out there is a graphical adventure called Buddy Knavery, written in the style of old-school games like Zak McKracken and Maniac Mansion. I’ve already wasted far too much time playing with it instead of updating this blog post! There’s some amazing work here – hard to believe that it was all written by one guy in his spare time…

Great Silverlight 2 Demo: Healthcare Demonstrator

Congratulations to Martin Grayson and team for building one of the smartest Silverlight 2 demonstrations I've seen to date. I saw parts of this demo a month ago when I was in the UK, and I'm delighted it's now released.

Whether or not you're involved in the healthcare sector, this demo does a great job of showing how Silverlight 2 can transform web-based application development. We're already starting to see many real-world applications using Silverlight 2, even in its beta 1 stage; I'll post a list of the best ones I've collected before the end of the week. With a beta 2 release not far away, momentum is continuing to grow. And keep an eye on this blog first thing Friday morning for a separate exciting announcement (he said elusively)...

Have YOU Updated Your Windows SDK Recently?

It can be pretty hard to keep everything up-to-date on a developer workstation these days. With so many CTP releases, betas, and service packs, I know I often realize that my own machine is behind in one area or another.

One particularly worthwhile update that might have missed your attention over the last couple of weeks is a new release of the Windows SDK, focused on enhancements in the .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008. Amongst other changes, this updated SDK has new documentation that covers all the new classes in WPF 3.5 (e.g. UIElement3D, System.AddIn, LINQ-based data binding), a variety of new samples for common Windows services such as User Account Control, Windows Search, Windows Error Reporting, Speech, and a range of shell APIs. If you've not installed the Windows SDK before, another incentive is a ZIP file containing over 100MB of sample WPF code (check out %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Samples\WPFSamples.zip).

After installing the Windows SDK, you'll want to do two things:

• Run the new Windows SDK Configuration Tool (Start / Programs / Windows SDK v6.1 / Visual Studio Registration) to ensure that this is set as the default help collection in Visual Studio
• Follow this workaround to fix a XAML Intellisense bug that will be very irritating if you're a WPF developer.

For more information on the Windows SDK, check out the team's blog or visit the recently overhauled Windows Vista development center on MSDN.