Latest Technology is in Your Radar

At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09), the software giant officially unveiled Silverlight 4 and released the first beta. You can grab the Silverlight 4 beta (build 4.0.41108.0) for Windows (7.63MB) or for Mac (15.4MB). Those with a sharp memory will notice the installer files have ballooned in size, though we can expect them to drop back down at least a little before the final release. As the filename unveils, this release is aimed at developers, so sticking with version 3 is a perfectly sound decision. Microsoft also took the time to unveil that now 45 percent of Internet-connected devices worldwide are using Silverlight.
Microsoft's goal with Silverlight is still to help developers put together high quality media and RIA applications for the Web and desktop. With version 4, the Silverlight out-of-browser capabilities which enable high-quality application experiences on the desktop have been improved, advancements in business application development (like access to other Microsoft products) have been made, and the HD-quality video experiences have been tweaked with native multicast and offline DRM support (both of which were demoed back in September 2009). If you want to see a full list of what's new, check out this page on Silverlight.net.
If you're a developer, ensure that you have Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 Beta 2 (3.43MB) installed, as it is a prerequisite for developing Silverlight 4 Beta applications using Visual Studio. You'll also want to grab the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (25.1MB). In terms of documentation, there's the Online Silverlight 4 Beta Documentation as well as the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Offline Documentation (66.0MB).
Silverlight 3 was released in July 2009, Silverlight 2 arrived in October 2008 and Silverlight 1 launched in September 2007. Officially, Microsoft expects Silverlight 4 to have a Release Candidate build, with the final arriving in the first half of 2010. The Silverlight 3 beta arrived four months before the final, and guess what event is happening four months from now? That's right, MIX 2010. We'd wager that Silverlight 4 will launch then