Silverlight 4

So the Silverlight platform has been quite interesting for some time in concept, and had some niche abilities that made it perfect for streaming media, or writing simple rich applications.  Around the time of Silverlight 3 things started to get interesting;  as the tools developed, and the platform matured!

Enter, Silverlight 4!

For those of you that have been waiting to adopt this technology into your own development lifecycle, I truly believe your wait is over.  Difficult or downright impossible things inside Silverlight applications have now been overcome.  Limitations such as Printing, Local File Access, mouse scroll wheel support, and out of browser experiences.

There has been a huge stir of Silverlight 4 activity at PDC09 this year (where they handed out free multi-touch windows 7 laptops to every attendee!!!) - yea, I know.  And some very cool demo's being displayed.  Watching the live stream (http://microsoftpdc.com/) during conference hours, left me intrigued enough to want to fire up and start to prototype some applications on the Silverlight 4 platform.

As I went looking, it took me a little longer than I would have liked to find all the things I needed to get started and give it an accurate test drive, so below is the link (link aggregation) on how to get started.

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/#tools

I know...the silverlight site.  Unfortunatly as a developer and MVP I'm used to finding what I need published under the MSDN downloads section, linear thinking FTW.

Dont forget as you get started to pop over to the videos located here:  All VERY good information

http://silverlight.net/learn/videos/silverlight-4-beta-videos/

I'm in process of wiring up an artist (photo) gallery currently, using Silverlight 4, RIA Services, and the new Toolkit, using Visual Studio 2010 of course.  So far I'm VERY impressed with the platform and where it's gone - it's finally at the point where I just dont feel like there's anything missing as previously.

 Good luck!