Silverlight 2 RC0: Here's what's new

The Silverlight 2 release candidate build has been released to developers so they can prepare for the upcoming release to web (RTW) of the product, and migrate their Beta 2 applications forward. This build has a number of functional, performance and stability related bug fixes. We’ve had to making some breaking changes along the way. There are also a few new features (which explains the silence on this blog and others like it, over the past few weeks). Here’s an incomplete list:

Per-frame callbacks
Create physics animations or override the animation system by hooking up for the CompositionTarget.Rendering event.

Controls
PasswordBox, ComboBox (well, a non-editable dropdown list only for now), MessageBox and ProgressBar.
Updated look and feel for controls.
IsEnabled and IsEnabledChanged added to the Control type.
Exposed virtual On* events on Control e.g. OnGotFocus, OnKeyDown, OnKeyUp, OnMouseEnter etc.

Support for popping up windows
Use the HtmlPage.PopupWindow API, in association with the new AllowHtmlPopupWindow param on the OBJECT tag to open a URI in a new browser window upon a user-initiated action. Note: doesn’t work on Safari because it doesn’t implement the right NPAPI contracts for this.

Accessibility
Improvements in accessibility and UI automation on Silverlight controls.

Networking
Support for making HTTP requests on background threads.
Upload support added to WebClient.
Support for percent escaped internationalized URIs for remote endpoints.

Input
A new LostMouseCapture bubbling event for when you lost capture.
Support for global keyboard character input into a TextBox (diacritics, non-ASCII characters etc.)

Resources
Extended the kinds of things that can be designated as application or element level resources e.g. Color, FontFamily, TextAlignment and many many more.

XAML
Default value support for custom dependency properties via PropertyMetadata.
Support for object element syntax for StaticResource.

With this release, the Silverlight 2 product is feature complete. Absent any major last-minute fire drills, the public surface area (APIs) in this RC should mirror the upcoming RTW product. Thank you for helping us build this product. Your feedback has been our magnetic north. Just a few more days until the ship sails…!

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