Silverlight 1.0: Preparing for the release candidate

Tim Sneath has announced on his blog that the first release candidate for Silverlight 1.0 will be made public in a couple of weeks. It is important for people with current and upcoming developments using Silverlight to prepare for this release as two very important things will happen:

• Some of the changes on this release will break previous Silverlight applications
• From this release and on and until the final release of the product no more breaking changes will be introduced.

So if you and your team have projects in Silverlight and you want to keep them up to date and running on this release you should be preparing for the breaking changes, as listed in Joe Stegman's recent blog entry.

At this point you can prepare by downloading a specific SDK for this version that will also include a document listing these changes and will teach you how to detect whether the application is running on the beta or RC version of the plug-in in order to make it compatible with both of them.

You can download this "Preview SDK" here.

Note: this file does not contain the release candidate, instead it contains the necessary information for you to start preparing for this release.

Currently there is no official date for another release of Silverlight 1.1. The Alpha version released in May is the most recent one and the Silverlight team has currently no plan for releasing a new version in the immediate future, despite a strong preference in the community about the 1.1's .NET version of Silverlight compared to 1.0's JavaScript support.

Images from LiveSpace into PhotoSphere

I signed up for Microsoft's Popfly sometime ago, but haven't really had time to get deeper into it.

Today I started playing with it and created my first "mashup": Images from LiveSpace into PhotoSphere.

A mashup is basically a combination of plug-ins that interact between them using a certain protocol. Some plug-in server data, others use this data and present it in a certain way.

For this specific mashup I'm using a plug-in that will output image links from my LiveSpace account. Those links will serve as input for another plug-in that will present the images in a SilverLight interface with a really cool rotating effect around a 3D Sphere.

You can see the result above these blog entry.

Note: You'll need the SilverLight plug-in and it takes some time to download all the images before you see anything.