BANGALORE, INDIA: Microsoft released Silverlight 2 Release Candidate (RC), next version of rich internet appliction platform, which became public on thrusday last week.

SilverLight, a cross platform program run type that enables developers to provide interactive experiences and rich Internet applications.

According to the post in Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, Microsoft Developer Division blog, he said: "There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship.  We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally."

He added, "We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight.  This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it." 

There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out.  As such, developers can only use the RC for development right now  and can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped.

Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework.  Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them.

The development has also updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use.  When upgrading from Beta2,  developers find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them.

The post also requested to report bugs to the silverlight forums, when stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC.