Welcome Silverlight 2 RTW!
This is the second birth I’ve been privileged to witness this month, and if I made any more comparison than that, my wife would surely kill me ;)
As of October 14, Silverlight 2 has now hit that most important of milestones: RTW (or RTM if you would rather picture conveyor belts full of CDs and boxes). Expect to see downloads live sometime in the morning.
Existing end users will be automatically upgraded to Silverlight 2 RTW. If your app is still running on Beta 2, now’s the time to bring it up to the current rev.
If you took advantage of the RC0 release to upgrade your Beta 2 applications, you’ll find the upgrade pretty painless; there are no breaking changes between RC0 and RTW. If you waited a bit and skipped RC0, however, you’ll have a bit more work to do. In that case, be sure to search on RC0 breaking changes, as that’s how you’ll find the more useful blog posts. For my own part, here are two posts I wrote regarding RC0 upgrade issues (Debugging VSM Styles and Introducing RC0).
To upgrade to RTW from RC0, all you should need to do is uninstall the old runtime, sdk, tools and blend, install the new ones and then recompile and deploy your application. If you’re using custom javascript instantiation or have hand-coded the object tag, you’ll need to do a little more work, primarily around upgrading to the latest silverlight.js and setting the type in the object tag.
You can find more information about the RTW milestone on Microsoft Presspass.
Silverlight adoption continues to grow rapidly, with penetration in some countries approaching 50 percent and a growing ecosystem that includes more than 150 partners and tens of thousands of applications. During the 17 days of the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, NBCOlympics.com, powered by Silverlight, had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video watched, increasing the average time on the site (from 3 minutes to 27 minutes) and Silverlight market penetration in the U.S. by more than 30 percent. Broadcasters in France (France Televisions SA), the Netherlands (NOS), Russia (Sportbox.ru) and Italy (RAI) also chose Silverlight to deliver Olympics coverage online. In addition, leading companies such as CBS College Sports, Blockbuster Inc., Hard Rock Cafe International Inc., Yahoo! Japan, AOL LLC, Toyota Motor Corp., HSN Inc. and Tencent Inc. are building their next-generation experiences using Silverlight.
And check out the continued investment in open source:
Microsoft announced plans to support additional tools for developing Silverlight applications by providing funding to Soyatec, a France-based IT solutions provider and Eclipse Foundation member, to lead a project to integrate advanced Silverlight development capabilities into the Eclipse IDE. Soyatec plans to release the project under the Eclipse Public License Version 1.0 on SourceForge and submit it to the Eclipse Foundation as an open Eclipse project.
So get to bed early tonight to be up and ready for all the fun tomorrow :)