Silverlight 2 Beta 2, Telerik RadControls for Silverlight CTP released

Why make two posts for big announcements when you can combine and kill two birds with one stone? "For better blog stats," shouts the fellow blogger in the back of the room. True, but blog stats be damned. This is big news and I want to bring it to you as directly as possible.

First, as you may have heard by now (or assumed based on my TechEd coverage), the second beta for Silverlight 2 has been released. This beta continues to drive towards the first official release of Silverlight 2 (can we call it Silverlight.NET?) and brings some much needed improvements to the plug-in. Among the new features are additional built-in UI controls and improved WPF compatibility, but (as usual) the best place to get a complete run down on the features is ScottGu's blog. A refreshed version of Expression Blend 2.5 has also been released, so be sure to grab that, too.

Next, Telerik has also released its first set of downloadable controls for Silverlight 2! The RadControls for Silverlight 2 CTP is our first preview of what we're doing in the Silverlight space and it includes a number of controls:

• RadMenu
• RadUpload
• RadTreeview
• RadCube
• RadNumericUpDown
• RadProgressBar
• RadTabPanel
• RadMediaPlayer

Many of the controls are new and have no matching "default" in the Silverlight platform. Others extend the default features to provide richer UIs and easier development- similar to what we've been doing for years with ASP.NET. These controls will launch officially with our WPF controls in the Q2 release, and by then a few more controls will be added to the mix:

• RadPanelBar
• RadWindow
• RadCombobox
• RadSlider
• RadCalendar
• RadDatePicker

By the end of the year, you'll see even more in our Silverlight suite (including a powerful DataGrid control). And even better, all of the controls that we ship for Silverlight will have near identical equivalents in the RadControls for WPF! Our Silverlight and WPF teams are literally sharing the same code-base, so aside from a few UI tweaks for the WPF and Silverlight environments, the APIs for the controls will be 100% the same. UI code reuse sound good to anyone?

For complete details on our Silverlight CTP, check out a post from the RadControls for Silverlight product team. You can also check out live demos of the controls and download trial versions to play with. Then keep it locked-in here as we inch closer to the Q2 release and prepare to launch what is quickly becoming the most complete and tightly integrated WPF and Silverlight UI control suites.