Silverlight 4 beta has just been demoed and launched at PDC09 by Scott Guthrie. It brings a lot of new functionality including microphone/webcam access, multi-touch, Google Chrome support, drag and drop to name just a few. As my own project will be made on Silverlight 4 beta, I can’t stress enough how awesome these new features are !

There’s a lot of information at Tim Heuer’s blog, so if you want a deep dive into Silverlight 4, that’s where you should be headed. Here are some useful snippets from his blog including the feature list and download links:

Features:

Download links:

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 Beta 2 (pick one)
• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010
• Expression Blend for .NET 4 Preview – for authoring Silverlight 4 and WPF 4 applications
• WCF RIA Services (formerly .NET RIA Services) (NOTE: This is actually included in the SL Tools for Silverlight 4)
• Silverlight 4 SDK CHM (offline documentation) – optionally online here as well
• Updated Silverlight Toolkit for Silverlight 4
• Developer runtimes: Windows and Mac platforms
• Silverlight 4 SDK only – not needed if you install the tools above
• Silverlight Media Framework – a new, Open Source media player framework for you to use.

Out of browser support Silverlight experience has been further enhanced, as well as the UI and theming, so this is a good time to get started with Silverlight 4. Adobe Air had just recently released the beta for version 2 which was aimed at fixing performance issues as well as provided some new features as well including multi-touch. I would personally recommend Silverlight 4 for your next best RIA.

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