Good news for the Silverlight fans – the first Silverlight release candidate is released. Note that this is not the final runtime, it is developer only. It is released to let developers get into the changes and reform their Silverlight beta 2 applications. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC. You can take a look at this great article for most of them. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now – you can’t go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though).

You can download today’s Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here.  Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1.  You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support.  If you don’t already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here. Continue Reading…