Silverlight 4 Beta Available

Oh yes – announced at PDC yesterday.

Silverlight 4 Beta – announced as NOW AVAILABLE!!!!!!! at http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/ and see http://channel9.msdn.com/learn include (what’s new)
Silverlight 4 RC – No Date
Silverlight 4 Final Release – No Date

I think perhaps March 22nd with VS 2010 fir the RC or final at a squeeze. According to Scott Guthrie, the RC may have more hardware accelerateion.

Silverlight 4 features:

Webcam & Microphone on the machine (including raw access); multi-cast streaming; offline DRM support
Printing; rich text; clipboard access; right click; mouse wheel; implicit styles; drag/drop; bidi & rtl; html hosting (including content as brush); commanding/mvvm; additional controls (including rich text)
Compile once, use in both SL and .NET 4; UDP multicast (p2p); rest protocol enhancements; improved WCF support (inc. TCP channel support); RIA Services; works better with OData (Astoria)
Offline features include: Windowing APIs; Notification popups; HTML hosting; Drop Target
New offline ‘elevated’ features include: Custom Windows Chrome, Local File System, Cross-Site Network; Keyboard in Full Screen Mode; Hardware Device Access; COM Automation of local objects (and location APIs).
Twice as fast; 30% faster startup; new profiling support
Support for Google Chrome.
Under 5MB to install.
Will ship the Silverlight 4 Facebook-integration demo as reference sample
70% of voted-for Silverlight 4 features (including 9 of top 10) included

Visual Studio 2010 Silverlight support: WYSIWYG Design Surface (not news), XAML IntelliSense Improvements; Improvements for Data Binding, Layout & Styles; WCF RIA Services Integration

Check out the PDC sessions (video showing up in the near future) on Silverlight 4:

Check out further PDC coverage