Silverlight, Silverlight, Silverlight…and laptops

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On the second day of the PDC, Scott Guthrie announced the release of the first beta of Silverlight 4. Well, I've been expecting Silverlight to replace WPF as the first-choice for line-of-business apps for a long time, and I was right. The number of new features is overwhelming. Just look at this comprehensive post written by Tim Heuer to get definitive prove. And as part of this release, they've renamed the RIA Services framework to WCF RIA Services and included it in the Silverlight 4 SDK. Check out this post to get some more info on what has changed since the last CTP. I spend the remainder of the day attending every Silverlight 4 session available. I'm so looking forward to using this in a real-life project.

One thing all attendees noticed this week is that the PDC was going through a crisis as well. There was no free breakfast, no party at Universal Studios and even no gadget. Well, the PDC organization has compensated for that big time. How? Well, because during the keynote, Steven Sinofsky announced that every attendee will receive a multi-touch convertible Acer Aspire 1420P tablet pc for free. Now that's what I call an awesome gadget! And it is fully installed with Windows 7, the Office 2010 beta and some nice showcase tools for its multi-touch support. I can tell you that the audience went wild when this was announced.

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