The Silverlight 4 Beta was unveiled at the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, continuing the rapid pace of innovation for the Silverlight platform. In addition, ASP.NET MVC Beta 2 was released, which introduces improved Visual Studio tooling support, extensible client validation and lots of other features that help developers build Web sites and applications faster.

Silverlight

Silverlight helps companies design, develop and deliver engaging, interactive user experiences for Web, desktop and mobile applications when online or offline. Silverlight is a free plug-in, powered by the .NET Framework and compatible with multiple browsers, devices and platforms. With printing support, rich reporting and charting, and integration with back-end systems and server products including Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), the Silverlight 4 Beta delivers a full suite of powerful features to application developers, bringing innovative platform capabilities to browser-based experiences.

For more information, see: http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/.

Also, check out Tim Heuer’s Silverlight 4 Beta guide to new features for details on how to install all the tools and get started.

ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET MVC is a free, fully supported framework that enables developers to quickly build standards-based, SEO-friendly Web sites by offering complete control over the HTML and URLs.

For more information, see: http://www.asp.net/mvc/.

Microsoft Office & SharePoint 2010 Beta

Microsoft Office 2010 gives you powerful new tools to express your ideas, solve problems, and connect with people. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

Fore more information, see: http://www.microsoft.com/2010/en/

Just a quick post to thank everyone who attended my MDC session yesterday. It was a great interactive session and I had a lot of fun. My slides are posted on Slideshare.net and I've embedded the presentation below. Enjoy!

I also promised to post a visio file with a set of blueprints for the minimum architectural view set that I proposed. It's on my skydrive here:

Update: Microsoft just announced that we have joined the Object Management Group (OMG) with a pledge to support the UML modeling standard. More details can be found here.

SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacturing (RTM'd) yesterday. For those of you with MSDN subscriptions, expect to see the ISO image available for direct download within the next week or so.