This week, during the Keynote for the Microsoft TechEd 2008 Developer conference (with TechEd now being in two parts – developer and it pro), it was announced (with little detail) that Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 is due for release by the end of this week – nothing as of Friday at 19:00ET.  There will (as with Beta 1) be a go-live license available.

One of the big Silverlight projects mentioned at Mix08 was the MSNBC Olympics site which will present ‘gazillions’ of hours of event video.  It was thought that this would be a Silverlight 1.0 solution, but the TechEd keynote also included the news that it would be running on Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2.

I believe we’ll be seeing the dual release of Silverlight 2.0 RTW and WPF SP1 RTW at the same time, towards the end of the summer, along with various developer tools.

I’d suggest staying tuned to Scott Guthrie’s and Tim Sneath’s blogs.

Update:

Scott’s blog was updated as predicted and here are the links…

Download links:

• Silverlight Tools Beta 2 (inc. runtime and SDK) (What’s New)
• Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview
• Deep Zoom Composer

Download of individual pieces

• Microsoft Silverlight 2 Beta 2 runtime
• Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK Beta 2
• Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK Documentation Only

Other info:

• Scott Guthrie’s announcement on his blog
• Breaking changes in beta 2
• Updated ‘Getting Started’ page
• What’s new in Silverlight 2 Beta 2
• Dynamically loading and displaying images in Beta 2.
• DataGrid Control Beta 2 Changes