Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Downloads

NOTE: Since this post has been a "work in progress", updated links are found starting at the nota bene number 2. You want "Silverlight_Chainer.exe".

Jeesh! I don’t know why they seem to make this stuff so hard to find. Here they are, more later ( go to the bottom for more recent links, including the "chainer")

 Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Download (4.66 MB)

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Documentation (50.3 MB)

Have fun!

 

At this point I haven’t been able to locate links for the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Visual Studio Tools, or the June Preview of Expression Blend.  You would think what with Tech Ed and all that Microsoft would be scrambling to get these links up on the Silverlight.net site, but – hey, that’s progress, huh?

if you happen to be reading this and you find the Tools or other links before I do and update this post, leave a comment with the hyperlink  so we can do a service to the .NET Developer community.

N.B. – The latest from MS at the Silverlight.net forums is that they are still testing and having some issues to solve with client deployment, and so they’re recommending to wait until everything is ready. If you install Beta 2 alone, it’s just going to break your Beta 1 apps and you will be spending a day or two accomplishing nothing, so…  Personally, I think this is really crappy timing. You guys knew there would be these big announcements about this stuff at Tech-Ed, and you really should have started your client deployment testing and fixed any glitches well before that. Either that, or just don’t make the announcments and  avoid getting people all hopped up over nothing. Just my 2 cents…

N.B. The SDK is now live as of 9:15 PM Friday June 6. (Link was intermittent at the time).

The Blend June Preview link also is working (for me).

And the Tools Link just worked for me (keep refreshing the page!) That's Silverlight_chainer, which has everything combined.

Yah, I'm complete. Had to wait till 9:30 PM EDT.

 

In case you are interested, here's what's inside Silverlight_Chainer.EXE:

 

Silverlight_Chainer.exe installs everything you need except the CHM documentation and the Expression Blend June preview.

Issues:  You may find an issue that SL 2 BETA 1 apps will not build or load. and  for New Apps:

"Loading this assembly would produce a different grant set from other instances. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131401)"

This is how I fixed the above issue, in case it happens to you:  It appears that there were a bunch of orphaned Registry entries left from previous installations. So I uninstalled Silverlight, the Tools, and the SDK (everything installed by Silverlight_Chainer.exe). Then, I removed all Registry entries with the word "Silverlight" in them, rebooted, and reinstalled Silverlight_Chainer. Now everything is fine. I use a proggie called Registry Crawler that lets you search the Registry, brings up all the matches, and all you need to do is CTRL-A to select them all and hit the DEL key.

You will find that most applications built with BETA 1 will fail, usually because of minor changes in control property names and so on. If you have an HTML "Launch" page that uses javascript, you'll need to change the "-b1" to "-b2" in the "type" attribute in order for it to work, otherwise all you'll get is an "Install Silverlight" image:

var objscript = '<object id="silverlight">data="data:application/x-silverlight," type="application/x-silverlight-2-b2" <-- this needs to be "b2"

Breaking Changes List

The list of breaking changes from B1 to B2 can be found in the Documentation CHM. Any updates to the list can be found at this link.