Microsoft releases Silverlight 2

Microsoft announced the availability of a new version of the technology Silverlight 2, one of the best in the industry solutions for developing and distributing applications and interactive content played by means of web-browser.
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-platform technology supporting most popular operating systems (Mac, Windows and Linux), as well as web browsers (Firefox, Safari and Windows Internet Explorer). Users can develop Silverlight-compatible apps in the environments of Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio 2, and also use toolset Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. In the near future, this possibility should also appear for users of the popular open development environment Eclipse IDE.
Unlike many others, Silverlight 2 supports a wide range of programming languages, including Visual Basic, C #, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby. Thus, developers will be able to take advantage of accumulated knowledge and skills to create new applications. Silverlight Version 2 offers many new features and tools that will help to improve the quality of established products, as well as enable designers and developers to work closely with each other. The developers are offered excellent built-in controls (DataGrid, ListBox, Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, etc.) as well as additional mechanisms to protect data content.
Expanded support of skins and templates allows developers to easily modify the look and functionality of applications. The solution will also include Deep zoom (scaling technology) and support a wide range of network protocols (including REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS and the standard HTTP-services).