It’s Silverlight Day!

As you’re probably aware by now, Silverlight 2 shipped last night. Scott Guthrie has an excellent summary of the details as well as the links you need to download the run-time and tools. He also spiced up the news with a few surprises:

• The Silverlight Toolkit, which will add lots of new controls to Silverlight and come complete with source code and an OSI license
•  eclipse4SL, a Silverlight plug-in for Eclipse that will “provide both a Silverlight development environment and greater interoperability between Silverlight and Java, to facilitate the integration of Silverlight-based applications into Java-based web sites and services”
• Silverlight XAML has been released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, which, to use Scott’s words, “enables anyone to create products that read and write XAML for Silverlight”

I have ported many of my Silverlight 2 code samples to the release version and have posted two of them for downloading. SilverLife is a Silverlight implementation of John Conway’s game of Life that demonstrates, among other things, dynamic XAML creation, isolated storage, browser integration, DispatcherTimer, and XML reading and writing. Magnifier is a sample program that demonstrates how to implement virtual magnifying glasses in Silverlight. I’ll be announcing many more new and updated samples soon.

On an unrelated subject, many people have commented on the pictures I use as desktop backgrounds on my laptop…pictures of some of my favorite RC airplanes and jets. If you’ve attended any of my presentations recently, you’ve probably seen the picture on the left down below. That’s my BVM BobCat. The latest addition to the Prosise hangar is a BVM Bandit, pictured below and to the right. It’s one sweet jet, and it would do close to 300 MPH if it weren’t for the pitot tube sticking out the front. That tube is wired into the electronics that control the turbine, and it speed-limits the jet to about 200 MPH, which is the legal limit at which these models are allowed to fly. I don’t have any video of the Bandit flying (yet), but will be sure to post some once I get a chance to do a video shoot.