Silverlight 3 Launches and Blend 3 RC is Released

Today is the launch of Silverlight 3! Also being released is a release candidate of Expression Blend 3!

Here is the official launch site and here is a new Microsoft site on Silverlight. The silverlight.net site has been updated as well.

One of my favorite new features of Silverlight 3 is, of course, Pixel Shader Effects. The Microsoft Silverlight site has a great overview of the main features and one of those sections is on these GPU rendered effects. Here is a link to a Silverlight 3 application that lets you play with them.

In honor of the Silverlight 3 launch, I have updated my test harness for my blend mode effects library. These effects, of course, are implemented with the new Pixel Shader Effects.

And, let’s not forget Blend! Here is Christian Schormann’s blog post announcing the Expression Blend 3 RC. In this version of Expression Blend, Sketch Flow is finally being released to the general public. This is an awesome tool that is geared toward the early, conceptual design phase and enables one to quickly mock up concepts allowing you to explore ideas at a much lower cost. SketchFlow is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s new in Blend 3. I personally just love the usability improvements (for example, the direct selection improvements) … but what about behaviors (1, 2, 3)? Whoa! Can we say powerful?!

Here is the link to download the Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

Here is the link to download the Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow RC.

Here is the link to latest version of the Silverlight Toolkit (July 2009) which also released in conjunction with the Silverlight 3 release.

A bunch of blog posts are hitting the internet about these releases and I see that Scott Guthrie’s highly anticipated post has finally been published.

Woot! Woot! Go Silverlight 3 and Blend 3!