Had to stream the PDC from Vienna, Austria, that was pretty cool that Microsoft gave that feed for people that didn’t make it to the PDC this year, yet I lost the chance to get my free laptop.

Silverlight Beta is OUT! Announced at the PDC 2009. This is the present Scott Guthrie took out of his pocket as well as 3 iPhones.

Silverlight 4 looks so amazing, the release candidate and hardware acceleration with now being able to get out of the browser with trusted support, means you can create a Silverlight 4 application that can be installed on the clients computer and run trusted to access the local system and call COM components. So Silverlight 4 can call ArcObjects if you hosting the ArcGIS Server in that machine? Or can you call a remote COM object?

Enhancements in no specific order.

• Implicit Styles
• Drag and Drop
• Bidi & RTL
• HTML control, so why not hosting flash in Silverlight?
• .NET RIA Services
• Print support with a print API.
• Drag and drop files from the OS to Silverlight to upload
• Use your right mouse button.
• Out of the box now with trusted support
• Call COM objects from Silverlight 4.

Download Silverlight 4 Beta.

Installing Silverlight 4 Beta with Silverlight 3

Make sure you remove the Silverlight 3 Runtime before installing VS2010 that will install a new Silverlight 3 Runtime with a newer project.

http://blogs.msdn.com/amyd/archive/2009/10/21/visual-studio-2010-and-silverlight-3-sdk.aspx

Getting started with Silverlight 4.

http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Download Visual Studio 2010 Beta here

Great Post from Time Heuer http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx about the new features coming out in Silverlight 4 in great detail. Brilliant

Cheers

Al