Last week Microsoft released the official version of Silverlight 3, a new CTP (July 2009) of RIA Services and a RC of Expression Blend 3.0. SL3 is a major update and it is released 9 months after version 2.0, which is quite fast. SL3 provides out of the browser support, HD media support, better graphics, improved data binding, search engine optimization (SEO) support, … It seems that SL3 RTW disables the designer in Visual Studio 2008 because people were having a lot of problems with it. Fortunately the future version 2010 will provide a fully interactive WYSIWYG designer including data binding support within the designer.
Following links can be used to download all the needed setups. Make sure to uninstall the previous versions first.
- Microsoft Silverlight 3 runtime, tools & SDK for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
- Microsoft Silverlight 3 offline documentation (CHM)
- Microsoft Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow RC (trial)
- Silverlight Toolkit July 2009
- Microsoft .NET RIA Services July 2009 CTP
It seems that these releases contain a lot of breaking changes. I’m already struggling 2 days to migrate a project that has been developed with Silverlight 3 beta and RIA Services CTP May. In SL3 the DataForm has been redesigned and there are changes in the AutoCompleteBox and DataGrid controls. In RIA Services a lot of things have been improved but also changed drastically; code sharing, loading data, authentication, custom validation, update parameters, …
Following blog posts and articles will help you to migrate:
- What is new in Silverlight 3 (Tim Heuer)
- Silverlight 3 changes
- RIA Services July 2009 overview: make sure to read this document again because a lot of chapters have been rewritten or added. Chapter 25 describes all the breaking changes.
- Silverlight Toolkit July 2009 change list
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