MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

This week at TechEd Microsoft announced the SilverLight Beta2.  You can download the latest bits for SL2, Visual Studio and Expression blend here. 

There's lot's of great stuff in the new beta - probably my favorite is the Datagrid now supports sorting and the ability to drag and drop to re-arrange columns.

Tim Heuer has a great post on using the new Tab Control here.  He also has some good posts on Visual State Manager (here)  and Skinning controls here

Scott Guthrie has a good overall post talking about a lot of the new features here.

Ok, so I said my favorite feature was the Datagrid changes, that might be tied with the fact that Data Services client is now built in.  Big thanks to Shawn Wildermuth who helped me get my query working the first time but here's an example calling to Data Services from SilverLight. 

This example is querying against a Data Services I built using the Adventure Works LT database.  If you haven't seen Data Services - it is one of the .NET 3.5 SP1 features and allows you to expose a Data Service from a LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework or a Custom provider model.  If you have SP1 and are looking for a quick walkthrough the .NET 3.5 SP1 Enhancements training kit can be downloaded here and has a hands on lab you can walk through.  Shawn also has a much more detailed post here that you will find interesting with detailed steps.

If you have existing Beta 1 SilverLight applications the first time you open the solution after you install beta 2 you will see the following dialog prompting you to upgrade.

I've been through updating a couple of applications so far and you need to really read the Breaking Changes between Beta 1 and Beta 2.  Like most beta 1 to 2 conversions there are some hand holding you will need to do to update your code to work with the new beta.  For example, a lot of the changes are simple either name space or property name changes like EnableMultiSelect has now changed to just MultiSelect.