A guide to what has changed in the Silverlight 4 RC

At MIX10, Silverlight 4 released an update, the Silverlight 4 RC (release candidate). A few things have changed since the beta which was released in November. If you haven’t read my guide to Silverlight 4 you may want to check that out. The features still exist, but there are some changes to the implementations of some of the features as well as some new ones. Please go read the previous post to familiarize yourself with the features. This post will be complimentary to that and identify new/changed.

First let’s get you going with the tools:

• Visual Studio 2010 RC
• Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (this installs Silverlight developer runtime, SDK, tools, and WCF RIA Services).
• Silverlight Toolkit March 2010 Release (coming soon)
  
• WCF RIA Services Toolkit
• Expression Blend 4 beta (note: existing Blend 3 licensed users will get this as a free upgrade)
• BREAKING CHANGES DOCUMENTATION – read this
• Windows Phone Developer tools

And since sometimes people just want to get going with learning resources here’s my top suggestions:

• Silverlight learning videos for Silverlight 4 (3 new feature ones added)
  • Custom Windows Chrome
  • XAP Signing
  • Full-screen pinning mode
• Silverlight 4 hands-on-labs – major updates including an 8-part business application lab
• Silverlight 4 books – check out what you can pre-order from the experts

So here we go, here’s my brain dump of some key areas of what you’ll be seeing in the Silverlight 4 RC. This is not all-inclusive, but I think a list of some that most will want to know about.

Changed	New
RichTextBox improvements WebBrowser control Printing API enhancements Native automation (COM interop) Language/Script support Networking and Sockets User consent dialog on webcam/clipboard/etc.	XAP Signing Custom window chrome for trusted applications Pinned full-screen mode WCF RIA Services Toolkit ContextMenu control SLLauncher silent installs

A quick note about Visual Studio 2010 RC

The Silverlight 4 tools linked above target the RC release of Visual Studio. There have been 2 patches to Visual Studio 2010 RC since it’s release. It is recommended that you have these two patches installed prior to installing the Silverlight tools. Information about these patches (and links to them) is available here.

Source : http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/03/15/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-rc-mix10.aspx