Download Silverlight 5 3D Babylon Toolkit

A CodePlex resource is available for download for those developers that need a bit of help with 3D work on projects involving the next generation of Silverlight.

Devs can head over to Microsoft’s open source repository and grab the Babylon Toolkit free of charge.

According to the official description, the “Babylon Toolkit provides a complete toolbox for Silverlight 5 3D.”

Developers that download the toolkit and start using it with Silverlight 5 will be able to find packed inside:

“- A complete Effect class with shaders and parameters support (with an integrate shaders and registers cache system)

- A Model/ModelMesh/ModelMeshPart object model

- A ModelContent/ModelMeshContent/ModelMeshPartContent object model to create Model hierarchy

- An importation system with support for .OBJ files

- Cameras classes: Orbit camera, Regular camera

- A BasicEffect for simple rendering modes which supports: Diffuse color & texture, Specular color & texture, Bump texture, Ambient color, Point light

- Ray intersections system: BoundingSphere and Mesh vs Ray.”

The Babylon Toolkit is available for download under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), which is an open source license.

Obviously, devs will need to download the public testing release of Silverlight 5 in order to leverage the toolkit.

At MIX11 this year, Microsoft released the first Beta development milestone of Silverlight 5, with the promise that the RTW Build will be available to both developers and end users by the end of 2011.

Among the many new additions to Silverlight 5 is the 3D Graphics API.

“Silverlight 5 now has built in XNA3D graphics API to enable you to build rich, GPU accelerated visualizations and rich user experiences. This includes a new 3D drawing surface control as well as immediate mode GPU access, shaders and effects for 2D and 3D use,” Microsoft reveals.

On top of GPU-accelerated XNA-compatible 3D and immediate-mode 2D API, Silverlight 5 Beta also includes:

“- XAML Debugging with breakpoints for binding debugging

- Implicit data templates for easy UI reuse

- Double (and multi) click support

- Low-latency sound effects and WAV support

- Real operating system windows and multi-display support

- Significant performance improvements, fixes and much more.”

I have included a number of downloads below, but the one I recommend that developers grab, since it contains all the Silverlight 5 Beta resources is the Microsoft Silverlight 5 Beta Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1.

The Babylon Toolkit is available for download here. Silverlight 5 Beta Developer Runtime for Windows is available for download here.

Silverlight 5 Beta Developer Runtime for Mac is available for download here.