Microsoft announced the releasing to Web of Silverlight 2 on October 13, 2008, and the availability of the gold bits the subsequent day, on October 14. As promised, the Adobe Flash killer, namely Microsoft's cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device browser plug-in is now up for grabs. This is, of course, the end user runtime. The gold version of Silverlight 2 comes with the Build number 2.0.31005.0, according to Microsoft.

“We’ve signed-off on the final release of Silverlight 2 - every control has been added, the last few bug fixes have made it into the release, and it’s finally ready to relinquish the “beta” mantle,” revealed Tim Sneath, Client Platform Technical Evangelist.

Launched just two years ago as an equivalent to what Adobe had to offer with Flash following the acquisition of Macromedia, Silverlight is growing its install base at fast pace. Microsoft revealed that in some markets, penetration is as high as 50%. Of course that at this point in time, Silverlight doesn't have sufficient pull to dislodge Flash altogether, but as the Microsoft technology becomes more popular among end users and web content developers, Adobe's position will undoubtedly be threatened.

“The final build number is 31005.0; some of you may already have installed this build without knowing it - we quietly updated the RC build on silverlight.net through the last couple of weeks to the latest builds, and the version we released a week ago was the one that was declared RTW,” Sneath added.

In terms of content, Silverlight 2 is fully compatible with version 1.0, although it is not valid for the Beta releases of version 2. “There are no breaking changes from Silverlight 1.0 - we have a philosophy of maintaining 100% compatibility between published releases,” Sneath revealed.

Silverlight 2 RTW (2.0.31005.0) is available for download here.