This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. 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 (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: 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, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here.  Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1.  You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support.  If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here. Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. 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.  You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release.  We have 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 you might 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. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks).  If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon).  Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics.  In addition to statically defining items like above, you can also use databinding with it.  For example, we could define a "Person" class like below: And the add a ComboBox to a page like so: And then write the below code to databind a collection of Person objects to the ComboBox (by setting its ItemSource property): At runtime our simple app will then display the data-bound Person names (note that we set the DisplayMemberPath property on the ComboBox above to display the "Name" value from our Person objects): We could then implement a SelectionChanged event handler like below to run code when a person is selected from the ComboBox: Notice above how we can retrieve a reference to the selected "Person" object from the databound ComboBox using the ComboBox's "SelectedItem" property.  We can then call the MessageBox.Show() helper method (new in the RC) to display a modal dialog box that displays some details about our selected person:   New Control Skins The final release of Silverlight 2 will have a much more polished set of default control template skins than those that were in Beta1 and Beta2.  Our goal with the default control templates is to have a look that is professional and attractive, can be used in the majority of applications as-is (without requiring you to author custom style templates), and which is also easily tweakable using Expression Blend. Today's RC build has skins that are close to the final look we plan to ship (there are a few final tweaks we are doing post RC on the focus color of controls, as well as to tighten up and tweak a few issues in some of the control templates).  Below is the default look for the DataGrid, RadioButton, CheckBoxes, and the DatePicker controls with today's RC build: Note that the DatePicker control above allows users to type in a date (with a masked edit to ensure it is a valid date), or they can click the calendar icon to the right of the textbox and select the date using a popup Calendar control: One of the most powerful features of Silverlight and WPF, of course, is the ability for designers and developers to completely customize the look and feel of any control.  This goes beyond simple styling of colors and fonts - you can literally completely change the visual UI of a control, as well as customize its behavior (for example: add animation) without writing any code. Within Expression Blend, simply right-click on any Silverlight control and choose the "Edit Control Parts" sub-menu to open and edit its control template:   When in control template editing mode, you can manipulate any sub-element of a control (for example: a checkbox's inner content), as well as customize each "state" its in (notice the states pane circled in red below).  This allows designers to customize what the control looks like in individual states (for example: checked, unchecked, mouseover, etc).  Silverlight will then automatically handle animating the control from state to state depending on the user action: You can learn more about how Silverlight's Visual State Model works from my previous blog post here.  Previous releases of Silverlight often rendered graphics on sub-pixel locations - which could cause lines and shapes to sometimes appear "fuzzy".  The RC of Silverlight has a new features called "layout rounding" that causes the layout system to round the final measure of a control to an integer ("pixel snapping"), which results in crisper lines and fewer rendering artifacts.  This feature is now on by default, and helps make applications look nicer. Summary The final release of Silverlight is not that far off now.  It has been a pretty amazing project that has come a long way in a pretty short amount of time. If you have existing Beta2 applications, please start getting them ready for the final release - as once we release Silverlight 2, users that have existing beta releases installed will automatically be upgraded to use the final version.  Testing your application out with the release candidate will ensure that you can easily update your applications and have them ready within hours of the final release. Let us know if you find issues with today's release candidate, and please make sure to post them on the forums on http://www.silverlight.net. Hope this helps, Scott

Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today.  You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here. Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine.  It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines.  These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out.  But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads.  You can download both of them here.  The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release.  UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup.  Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size).  Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download.  This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications.  This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight. Control Template Editing Support One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming model is the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls.  This allows developers and designers to sculpt the UI of controls in both subtle and dramatic ways, and enables a tremendous amount of flexibility.  I covered these concepts a little in my previous Silverlight Control Templating blog post here. This week's Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview now adds designer support for editing control templates - which makes it easy for you to quickly change the look of any control without having to drop-down to XAML source to-do it.  To see control template editing in action, just drag/drop two Slider controls onto the Expression Blend design surface: We might decide that the slider head in the default Slider control template is too large and wide for our application.  To use control template editing to change it, we can right-click on one of the sliders in the designer and select the "Edit Control Parts" context menu item.  We can choose to create a new empty control template for our slider (and start from scratch), or alternatively edit a copy of the built-in control template (and start from that and tweak it): After we choose to edit a copy of the existing control template, Blend will prompt us to create and name a re-usable style resource that we'll define our control template within.  We can name it and then choose to store the style at either the application level (within App.xaml) or within our current page/user-control: When we click "ok" we'll find ourselves in template editing mode for our Slider control.  We can change, tweak, or add/remove any of the underlying elements within the Slider control's template.  Notice below how in template editing mode we can see and select any of the underlying elements that make up the slider's control template (these are circled in red below in the "Objects" window).  To make our slider head narrower, we can select the "HorizontalThumb" element within the control template and adjust its width (either graphically or via the property grid):  We can then use the breadcrumb navigation bar at the top of the designer to navigate back to our page and see the control template changes applied: Notice that right now only one of our slider controls is using the new Style resource with the control template we defined.  To apply the same style resource to the other slider control as well, we can select it, right-click, and then use the "Apply Resource" context menu to apply our "ScottSlider" style to it as well: Once we do this both our sliders reference the same style: Changes we make to the "ScottSlider" style going forward will automatically apply to both controls. Note that all controls shipped with Silverlight 2 support control templates and will support the above editing experience in Expression Blend. Visual State Manager (VSM) Support Control templates in Silverlight and WPF support customizing both the "look" of a control, as well as the "feel" of a control.  By "feel" I mean changing its interactive responsiveness.  For example: how it reacts when pushed, when it gets focus, loses focus, is in a pushed state, is in a disabled state, has something inside it selected, etc.  Often you want animations to execute when the user interacts with a control like this. One of the new things we are introducing with Silverlight 2 Beta2 is a "Visual State Manager" (VSM) feature that makes it much easier to build interactive control templates.  VSM introduces two basic concepts that you can take advantage of within control templates: "Visual States" and "State Transitions".  For example, a control like Button defines multiple visual states for itself - "Normal", "MouseOver", "Pressed", "Disabled", "Focused", "Unfocused".   When in template editing mode in Blend, designers now have the ability to easily edit what the button looks like in each particular state, as well as setup transition rules to control how long it should take to animate when moving from one state to another.  At runtime Silverlight will then dynamically run the appropriate animation Storyboards to smoothly move the control from one state to another. What is nice about this model is that designers do not need to write code, do not need to manually create animation storyboards, and do not need to understand the object model of controls in order to be productive.  This makes the learning curve for creating interactive control templates really easy, and means that existing graphic designers can very easily work on Silverlight projects.  Later this year we will also be adding Visual State Manager (VSM) support to WPF as well, which will let you use the same approach with Windows applications as well as share control templates between WPF and Silverlight projects. To see an example of this in action, let's add a Button control onto our design surface: We can then right click on the button and edit its control template. Instead of starting with the existing default control template (like we did with the slider example above), let's create an empty control template and start from scratch: Blend will prompt us for the name of the Style resource we want to create.  We'll name it "ScottButton" and click ok.  This will then put the designer in control editing mode for the Button, and start with an empty control template: One of the things to notice above is the new "States" window inside Blend.  This will show us all of the available "Visual States" that the Button control exposes.  Above the "Base" state is currently selected - which allows us to define the common visual tree of our Button control template.  We can then add some vector elements into our base state that defines the look of a custom button like below.  We could use the built-in vector drawing tool support provided by Blend to author these graphics, or alternatively use Expression Design or Adobe Illustrator to build the vector art and then import it into Blend.  Below we are adding 4 "Path" elements into our control template - one a rounded background (named "background"), one a drop shadow (named "shadow"), one a 40% opacity "shine" that adds a glow near the top, and one that defines the default inner content (in this case a picture of a house): Note: we could have alternatively imported an image, but using vector elements will give us the flexibility to scale/stretch/transform the button later and retain a crisp look and feel at any resolution or scale (particularly useful with Silverlight mobile scenarios - where screen resolutions might be different or smaller).  It will also allow us to easily animate/change any vector element within the artwork. Once we've finished designing our base state above, we can press F5 to run our application in the browser: As you can see above - our Button control now has a nicer look.  Despite its new look, the button still raises the same focus, click and hover events just like before - so a developer using the button does not need to change any code when working with a button that uses our new control template. One downside with our new button control template, though, is that it isn't interactive.  This means that I don't get any visual feedback if the button gains/looses focus, or if a mouse hovers over it.  I also don't get a nice depress/bounce-back animation when I click it. To add interactivity to our button, we'll return back to Blend and work with our Button's control template again.  Previously we added vector graphic elements to the "Base" state of our Button control.  This allowed us to define the default visual look of all visual states of our Button.  We can now go back and customize individual Button visual states further. For example, to implement a mouse-over behavior for our Button, we can select the "MouseOver" state in the "States" window, and then tweak the look of the button when it is in that state.  Below I've selected the "shine" vector element inside our control template and adjusted its Opacity property in the property grid to have it be more visible when in the MouseOver state.  Notice how Blend automatically highlighted the "Shine" element with a red dot and then listed the Opacity property below it in our objects window.  This makes it easy to quickly track all changes that we've made between the "Base" state and the "MouseOver" state in our control template: We can then select the "Pressed" state in the "States" window, and customize what a button looks like when it is pressed.  We'll change two things from the "base" state.  The first change is to make the "shine" element visible (like the MouseOver state). The second change will be to slightly offset the contents of the button control - while keeping the shadow element stationary.  This will give the button a nice "depressed" look and contrast nicely with its base visual: We can implement the offset change to the background, content and shine elements by selecting them in the designer, and then apply an offset render transform to them in the property browser: And now when we run our application again in the browser, we'll find that our Button now has interactive visual feedback when it is being used.  Below is the "normal" look of our Button: Hovering the mouse over the Button will then cause it to glow like below: Clicking the button will then cause it to depress and hide the shadow (it will then bounce back once the mouse button is released): Note that we did not have to write any code or XAML to change our Button's look and feel - the new Visual State Manager feature automatically handled moving between visual states for us.  By default Silverlight dynamically constructs and runs a transition Storyboard for you as you move from visual state to visual state (providing a smooth animation between the two states).  You do not need to write any code in order to make this happen (note: you do still have the ability to drop down and add a custom Storyboard transition if you want to, but for most cases you can probably use the automatic Storyboard transition). One feature you can take advantage of with Silverlight's automatic transition feature is to customize the time duration it takes for a visual state transition to occur.  You can do this by clicking the arrow to the right of a visual state and setup a rule that controls how long it should take the transition animation to run when moving from one particular state to another. For example, we could indicate that we want it to take .2 seconds to transition from the "Normal" to "MouseOver" visual state by adding the rule below: We can then configure this rule to take .2 seconds to transition between Normal->MouseOver like so: We can then click on the "MouseOver" state and setup a rule that causes the transition from MouseOver->Normal to take .4 seconds: Now when we re-run our application we'll have slower animation transitions for MouseOver scenarios, which adds a slightly smoother and more polished feel to our application.  We did not have to write a single line of code to enable this.  All controls shipped with Silverlight 2 will have built-in support for Control Template and Visual State Manager customization like above. To learn more about the new Visual State Manager and Control Template Editing features, please check out the tutorials here and here, and the videos on it here, here, and here. TextBox Beta2 includes some significant improvements to the built-in TextBox editing control.  Text scrolling with text-wrap, multi-line text selection, document navigation keys, and copy/paste from the clipboard are now supported. Beta2 also now includes IME Level 3 input support (including candidate window selection) for non-western character sets: Input Support Beta2 adds additional keyboard support in FullScreen mode (arrow, tab, enter, home, end, pageup/pagedown, space).  Note: full key input support isn't allowed to avoid password spoofing scenarios. Beta2 also adds new APIs to support inking and stylus input support. UI Automation and Accessibility Beta2 adds UI Automation Framework support into Silverlight.  UI Automation (or UIA) enables screen readers and other assistive tools to identify and interact with the components that make up your Silverlight 2 application. Beta2 uses the UIA framework and adds UIA based behaviors to an initial set of Silverlight controls.  By the final release of Silverlight 2 all controls will have UIA based behaviors built-in.  We will also add support for high-contrast scenarios.  These features will enable you to build accessible, section 508 compliant, applications.  This UIA support will also enable automated UI testing of applications. Animation and Graphic System Beta2 adds support for animating custom dependency properties.  Object animation support (animating structs) is also now supported.  Beta2 also supports the ability to create Storyboards in code that can animate parts of the render tree without having to be added to it (allowing you to embed animations entirely in code).  Per frame animation callback support will be added in the final release. Beta2 includes a new Visual Tree Helper static class that provides advanced visual tree inspection APIs.  It provides features such as the ability to enumerate children of an element and getting the ancestor/parent of a given reference element.  These APIs work against any UIElement you pass to it. DeepZoom Beta2 now supports an XML based manifest file for DeepZoom collections.  Beta2 also adds extensible MultiScaleTileSource support for DeepZoom (which allows developers to hook up existing image pyramids that don’t conform with the Deep Zoom format to the high performance rendering of Deep Zoom). WPF Compatibility Silverlight Beta2 includes a lot of fixes/changes to improve API compatibility between Silverlight and WPF (note: the final Silverlight release will contain some additional compatibility work as well).  We are also adding some new APIs we are introducing in Silverlight 2 to WPF in .NET 3.5 SP1 this summer. This work, combined with the VSM support we are adding to WPF later this year, will enable good code re-use across browser and desktop applications. Media Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes some significant Media related feature work: Adaptive Streaming Beta2 adds support for "adaptive streaming" - which enables you to encode media at multiple bit-rates and then have a Silverlight application dynamically switch between them depending on the network and CPU conditions. This enables much richer end-user media experiences - since it makes it possible for content providers to provide both lower-end and higher-end bit rate versions of a video, and then have Silverlight choose the optimal one to use based on an end-user's machine hardware and network capacity.  If while watching the video the machine or network conditions change, Silverlight can automatically switch to a more appropriate bit-rate without any buffering or interruption glitch. Silverlight's support for adaptive streaming is extensible - which enables anyone to plug-in their own logic to control where the media content comes from, and what bit-rate should be used.  This means that any CDN or media delivery provider can easily integrate their systems with Silverlight and deliver super high quality video delivery. Content Protection Beta2 includes DRM content protection, and supports Windows DRM and PlayReady DRM.  Both work cross browser and cross platform. Server Side Playlists Beta2 adds support for server side playlists (previous releases only supported client-side playlists).  Networking Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the networking space: Cross Domain Sockets Beta2 now enables cross domain networking support using both HTTP and Sockets (meaning your application can call sites other than the one the application was downloaded from). Silverlight will check for the existence of an XML policy file on target servers that indicates whether cross domain network access is allowed.  Silverlight supports a new XML policy file format that we've developed, as well as Flash policy files (which means existing sites open to Flash can be called from Silverlight without any additional work). Background Thread Networking Beta2 now allows Silverlight applications to initiate network requests on background threads, as well as process/handle network responses on background threads.  This enables a bunch of powerful scenarios, and allows you to avoid blocking the browser's UI thread while doing both HTTP and Socket network communication. Duplex Communication (Server Push) Beta2 enables support for setting up duplex communication channels with a WCF service on a server.  This enables a clean programming model that allows servers to "push" messages to Silverlight clients without the developer having to manually poll servers for changes.  This programming model is very useful in a variety of scenarios, including instant messenger/chat applications, and monitoring/update applications like stock tickers and trader applications. Web Services Beta2 enables significantly improved interop with SOAP based web-services.  Web service proxy class end-point URLs can now be configured without recompiling applications.  Visual Studio also now has a new "Silverlight-enabled WCF Service" project item template that you can add to ASP.NET web projects to publish services to clients. REST and ADO.NET Data Services Silverlight includes support for working with REST based web-services.  Beta2 adds support for calling and consuming ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named: "Astoria").  ADO.NET Data Services will ship as part of .NET 3.5 SP1 and makes it easy to publish data end-points within an ASP.NET web project that are consumable from any client using REST URIs.  Silverlight Beta2 now includes ADO.NET Data Service client support that allows you to easily call these services (and optionally use LINQ expressions within Silverlight to express remote REST queries to them). JSON Silverlight supports calling JSON-based services on the web.  Beta2 now includes LINQ to JSON support that enables you to easily query, filter, and map JSON results to .NET objects within a Silverlight application.  This makes it easy to call and work with existing AJAX end-points and services published on the web.  Data Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the data space: DataGrid Beta2 adds a number of new features to the DataGrid control. These include: Auto-sizing support for columns and rows Column sorting (with both single column and multi-column sort support)  Column re-ordering support by end-users (allowing them to drag/drop columns to re-arrange the order) Frozen column support (allowing you to prevent a particular column from being customized) Performance and bug fixes DataBinding Beta2 adds more core data-binding features and better validation support.  These include: Per-binding Validation and BindingValidationError event handler support on controls (allowing you to handle input validation with TwoWay bindings) Support for binding expressions on attached properties Richer binding value conversion support (including value conversion fallback support) Isolated Storage Silverlight enables applications to store data locally on a client (via a feature we call "Isolated Storage").  Applications can prompt users to grant them size permissions for this storage (for example: a user might grant an email program 50MB of local storage).  Beta2 increases the default local storage space provided to Silverlight applications to 1MB in size.  Beta2 also now provides better end-user support for managing per-site storage permissions, as well as the ability to easily revoke/delete an application's local storage.  Management UI to control this can now be brought up by an end-user by right-clicking on a Silverlight application and choosing the "Silverlight Configuration" menu option. Understanding Compatibility with Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Silverlight 2 Beta2 is compatible with applications that target Silverlight 1.0. Silverlight 2 Beta2 will not run applications that target Silverlight 2 Beta1, since we've made a number of API changes between the two betas for the new features being added in Silverlight 2.  Browsers that have Silverlight 2 Beta1 installed which visit a site that hosts a Silverlight Beta2 application will be prompted to upgrade to the newer beta of Silverlight.  Once they do this they won't be able to run Beta1 applications without uninstalling Beta2.  This means that if you have published a running sample on the web built with Beta1 you will probably want to update it to Beta2 soon.  We have published a document that details the changes between Beta1 and Beta2 here that can help with this.  I also recommend reading Shawn Wildermuth's What Changed in Silverlight 2 Beta2 and Upgrading your Silverlight 2 Projects to Beta2 posts for more details on some of the changes between Beta1 and Beta2. Summary To learn more about Silverlight 2 and download the Beta2 release, please visit the http://www.silverlight.net and http://expression.microsoft.com web-sites.  We'll be posting articles, tutorials, videos and more on both sites in the days and weeks ahead.  I'll also be posting some tutorials of my own here on my blog as well.  If you haven't already read them I'd also recommend checking out my previous First Look at Silverlight 2 and First Look at Expression Blend with Silverlight 2 blog posts that I wrote a few months ago when Beta1 shipped, since they provide a good overview of the Silverlight programming model and how to target it using both Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend. Hope this helps, Scott

One of the things I like to track are book sales on Amazon.com, which provides a useful data point to monitor what developers are interested in on any given day.  I use the www.TitleZ.com site (which is built using ASP.NET) to track specific titles I want to watch - it then generates a report showing real-time Amazon sales ranking data, as well as 7 day, 30 day and 90 day sales ranking averages. This morning I pulled up my report and saw the usual books near the top of my list, and was about to navigate away when I noticed the eye-popping amazon ranking of the top book -"Professional ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB" by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader.  Its Amazon sales rank was a stunning #95 (of all books on Amazon), which meant it was outselling even Harry Potter (which is pretty much unheard of for any technology book). It turns out that Amazon is holding a special price promotion for a short time on a few books - and this was one that was selected.  Instead of the usual $54 price, you can buy it for a short time for a ridiculous $16.49.  I'm not sure how long this promotion will last - but if you are looking for a great ASP.NET 3.5 book this might be something you might want to take advantage of: The book is a great ASP.NET 3.5 book and an excellent end to end resource.  It has been on the best seller list for programming books since it came out in March (usually in the top 5 of all programming titles), and has received glowing reviews (I posted a review of it on Amazon a few weeks ago and gave it 5 stars). If you are in the market for a good ASP.NET book, you might want to consider taking Amazon up on this offer before it closes (and apologies in advance if the price changes before you read this). Hope this helps, Scott P.S. If you are looking for other good .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 books - I also recommend: C# 3.0 In a Nutshell, LINQ in Action, and Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2008 (all of which average a 5 star rating on Amazon).

But ETOA is concerned about caveat

Aegean Airlines to run three flights a day to Athens

A former tourism student is awarded £4,495 after being attacked by leeches on a jungle field trip six years ago.

A day after a big conference in the US, Palestinian and Israeli leaders are to start a new round of talks. Send us your views.

Villagers face a 10 mile-round trip along a dirt path to the nearest post office if a local branch is closed.

If the statistics are to be believed, Americans are flocking to their computers to do their holiday shopping this year. They spent $733 million on the first day of the e-tailing season.

Intel upgraded its software development tools for Apple's Mac OS X Leopard operating system, keeping a promise to Apple and pushing Mac applications to its brand new Penryn chips.Intel announced on Wednesday that the Intel Software Development Products for Mac OS X includes Version 10.1 of its C++ Compiler and Fortran Compiler. The tools have been optimized for Apple's Leopard and Xcode 3.0 development environment, which was launched last month, said James Reinders, a product evangelist at Intel. The tools, which also include libraries, have been upgraded to use features in Intel's latest 45-nanometer Penryn microprocessor, he added."We had the opportunity to update with some new enhancements to take better advantage of multicore, but the other big thing is Leopard," said Reinders. "We've got full support for 64 bit because Leopard added 64 bit top to bottom. We've had pretty good support before, but the release of Leopard and the update to our tools completes that picture, giving them an easier way to write programs."He also noted that when Apple started using Intel chips, the company looked to Intel to provide software developers with the tools they would need to make writing Mac applications easier."When Intel and Apple got together, they were very specific in their interest in our tools. At that time, we did promise that we would have a C++ and a Fortran compiler in our libraries," said Reinders. "We made good on that promise. In this day and age, software developers have come to believe that some of the most basic tools -- compilers and libraries -- just need to be there. The more sophisticated microprocessors get, the more people look to Intel to supply these basic tools like compilers and libraries to take advantage of these processors."Intel said that its new SSE4 instruction set is designed to increase multimedia performance. The set first came out with the launch of the Penryn chip family earlier this month.Reinders noted that many of the upgrades to the tool set focus on optimizing applications for dual- and quad-core systems. He noted that Intel's compilers have autoparallelizing capabilities and libraries for Mac OS X."This is a significant step in that it brings full Intel support to the Mac operating environment," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting. "It will help application developers modernize their applications with multithreading so their applications can take better advantage of current and future multicore Intel processors. This is very important, as applications that can't use multicore processors won't be able to provide better performance in the future."Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate

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