14 DAY TRIAL // Developers that are currently leveraging Microsoft’s alternative to Adobe Flash for their Cloud -based, client- or server-side projects are undoubtedly already aware that the company has produced the first Beta of the next iteration of Silverlight. Released in November 2009, the first Beta development milestone of Silverlight 4 is available as developer-only Build. Lacking a go-live license, Silverlight 4 beta can only be used for testing purposes. Devs that need a little help getting their Silverlight projects started can access free training from Microsoft. The Silverlight 4 Training Course is available via the Microsoft Download Center free of charge.
“The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes hands-on-labs, a video and a whitepaper designed to help you learn about the new features in Silverlight 4 focusing on three major areas: Enabling Business Application Development, Empowering Richer Experiences and Moving Beyond the Browser. Some of the new highly anticipated features include Printing, WebCam and Microphone support, custom right-click, rich text, HTML support and access to local files with trusted applications,” Microsoft explained.
Since Silverlight 4 Beta is exclusively a developer release without “go-live” licensing, Microsoft has not made the end-user runtime of Silverlight 4 Beta generally available. The runtime that was released is also designed for devs to test Silverlight 4 Beta. A number of links included at the bottom of this article point to the releases made available by Microsoft at the end of 2009, and are bound to come in handy to developers.
“Silverlight 4 Beta enhances the building of business applications, media applications, and applications that reach beyond the browser. New features include printing support, significant enhancements for using forms over data, full support in the Google Chrome web browser, WCF RIA services, modular development with MEF, full support in Visual Studio 2010, bi-directional text, web camera and microphone support, rich text editing, improved data binding features, HTML support, MVVM and commanding support, new capabilities for local desktop integration running in the new “Trusted Application” mode such as COM automation and local file access,” Microsoft stated.
Silverlight 4 SDK Beta is available for download here.
Silverlight 4 Beta is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4 is available for download here.
Silverlight 4 Beta is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Studio 3 Trial is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Web 3 Trial is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow Trial is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Design 3 Trial is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 is available for download here.