With the achievement of many product milestones at Microsoft, you can generally expect a post from Scott Guthrie. These well-written posts usually contain valuable information about the future product direction so it's always a good idea to read these posts (along with the comments) if you want to pick up on these tidbits. Below, I have extrapolated a few interesting items about the future of Silverlight from the Silverlight 2 - Beta 2 Post:
- "We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight"
This is cool, because there are only about 30 controls now. From the comments, Scott says that the drop down list / combo box will appear in the final release of Silverlight 2. I suspect that I lot of these controls are already being developed, they are just waiting for the controls to reach a certain level of quality before releasing them into the wild.
- WPF Compatability
Work is being done to improve compatibility with WPF, we should expect to see more changes to improve compatibility between the two technologies in future releases.
- Animation
You can now create storyboards in code and apply them to elements without specifically adding them to the document tree. Scott also mentions that per-frame animation callbacks will be included in the final release of Silverlight 2 as well.
- Interactive XAML Designer for Visual Studio.
They are working on support for a full-fledged interactive designer for Visual Studio. Hopefully, this will reduce the need to drop into Blend to do simple tasks. I'm not sure what the time line is for this.