Silverlight 2.0 Release Candidate 0 Launched

It's taken a while and it's not quite there yet but Microsoft's Flex Killer - Silverlight 2.0 is nearing release and the first release candidate is now available. Release candidates are usually a very good indication of what the final release will be; they are for eliminating bugs and there should be little difference between them and the final release.

The full release is expected to be sometime in Q4 08 (i.e. the next month or two) and should be ground breaking in terms of running C# on other platforms. I think it will pose a major threat to Flash in the web GUI arena rather than games. I think Flash is great for fancy avant garde "designer" web sites and games as it is now but Silverlight will clean up with really powerful web applications that are much faster to develop in C#. This is competing directly with Flex- Adobe's web development system that is built upon Flash technology. It's a new battle for control of your browser!

Note this Release Candidate is aimed at developers and includes tools Visual Studio 2008 (Sp1). These will also work with the free Visual Web Developer Express (again with SP1).

• Link to C# Tutorials