Silverlight 5 RC SDK and Silverlight 5 RC Tools for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Released

With the advent of the Release Candidate development milestone of Silverlight 5, Microsoft is also providing early adopters with a collection of development resources via its Download Center. Devs building projects for the next major iteration of Silverlight can download not only RC Build 5.0.60818.0, but also the software development kit, and additional tools to make their work simpler.

Silverlight 5 SDK RC is one of the releases that are accompanying the RC Build of Silverlight 5.

“The Microsoft Silverlight 5 SDK RC contains online documentation, online samples, libraries and tools for developing Silverlight 5 RC applications,” the software giant said.

It’s important to underline that Silverlight 5 doesn’t feature a go-live licenses, and as such, all projects built with the technology are limited to testing scenarios and cannot be shared with the public.

Devs can also download WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP2 RC, also a release offered in conjunction with Silverlight 5 RC.

“WCF RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier,” the Redmond company added.

Of course, developers can opt to get the two resources mentioned above as standalone downloads, or they can download them as components of the Silverlight 5 RC Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 package.

Silverlight 5 RC Tools for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 contains the Silverlight 5 RC Developer Runtime, the Silverlight 5 RC SDK , the update for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1 and the WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP2 RC.

Silverlight 5 Release Candidate (RC) Build 5.0.60818.0 is available for download here.