Url: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/…

In case you haven’t heard yet, Microsoft announced that a Release Candidate of the Silverlight 2 tools are now available. You can download it now here:

• http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/sl2rc0.aspx

Included is the Silverlight 2 SDK, Silverlight 2 Visual Studio Tools, the Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime and Blend 2 SP1 (was called Blend 2.5 but is now a patch to Blend 2 instead). Note that the Release Candidate should give you time to get your applications ready for release, but that the runtime won’t be generally available on the Internet until Silverlight 2 reaches release. Unlike when Silverlight 2 Beta 2 was released, you won’t have to rush to fix your applications.

This means there is no “Go-Live” license with the Release Candidate, but you can modify your code to be compatible with the release and be ready to deploy them once the RTW (Release to Web) happens (which hopefully will happen soon).

Note: Beta 2 users will automatically be upgraded to the RTW version once its available.

Also make sure you look at the Breaking Changes document to see what’s changed.  The changes are not dramatic but there are a couple of surprises:

• By default all rendering is now pixel aligned.  This should allow you to avoid that sub-pixel rendering issues that plagued earlier releases.  You can enable sub-pixel rendering if you need it.
• Blend 2 SP1 now supports the Font Manager (so you can embed and even subset fonts automatically).
• New controls were released (ComboBox, ProgressBar and PasswordBox).
• Fonts now must be assembly resources (no more free floating fonts in the .xap file).
• Custom Control XAML files now must exist in a themes folder instead of at the root of the project.

For all the changes, please review the Breaking Changes document.

I am currently converting all my examples to RTW and they will ship when the release happens.