What's been announced about Silverlight 2? See ScottGu's "First Look" post

I've had a lot of people ask me for hints about what's in Silverlight 2. My general strategy is to tell them to read Scott Guthrie's blog, then fake a seizure. That strategy will work even better starting today, since Scott just posted a First Look at Silverlight 2, along with an eight part tutorial on building a Silverlight Digg client.

There's a lot of information in this series. I think it's an excellent read:

• It's a great overview of what Silverlight 2 looks like.
• It's a great way to see the developer workflow and Visual Studio experience developing Silverlight 2 applications.
• It's a great summary of what's been publicly announced on Silverlight 2, plus plenty of new information. If you had a half hour to get up to speed on Silverlight 2, this is how you should spend it.

I've been working with the Silverlight 2 bits on my current project for months now, and I spent a lot of time working with Silverlight 1.1 before that. Still, I find these kind of walkthroughs to be extremely worthwhile since they communicate intangibles like the "feel" and "story" of the product.

I know that the percentage of my readers who don't already read ScottGu's blog - or wouldn't see this on DotNetKicks - is pretty low. Due to the questions and blog comments asking for information, though, I'm going to break my policy on "forwarding blog posts" - this is must read material.

UPDATE: Adam Kinney has a nice summary of Scott's post and the walkthrough. It's especially useful if you just want to see what's new.

Here are some pictures from the series which will hopefully get you interested enough to read it:

Hey, what's that XAP thing?

The finished product. What's most impressive is that this was built relatively quickly - you could have designed this in Silverlight 1.1, but it would have been a 135 part walkthrough rather than an 8 part one:

Showing the WebClient request to Digg. Hey, is that a cross-domain call?

Linq To Xml (note with IntelliSense) - the result is then bound to a DataGrid: