Developers rejoice, ScottGu announced the wide availability to developers everywhere of the Silverlight 2 Release Candidate tonight.

There were some changes since the Beta 2 release of Silverlight that require updated unit testing bits. I'll be releasing an updated drop of the Silverlight Unit Test Framework by the end of the week.

It's more clear with this release that Silverlight 2 is providing all the basic controls you need, one of the new inclusions since Beta 2 are these new controls:

• ComboBox
• ProgressBar
• PasswordBox

The new visual styles are also very crisp and good looking. I've been pretty happy with the new release so far!

Unit testing framework changes from Beta 1/Beta 2 to the Silverlight Release Candidate

The effort required to update your apps from Beta 2 to the release candidate will vary. I've had some applications just require a rebuild, while others have taken some large style and template updates. Either way, I think the developer availability of the release candidate signals the importance of updating apps. Breaking changes document here.

For updating your dev unit tests, we've only introduced very minimal breaking changes from the original release of the Silverlight Unit Test Framework. At a high level, a simple recompile should work, combined with these changes:

• The Silverlight.TestSurface property on the optional SilverlightTest base class has been renamed and made more accessible, it now is simply a "TestPanel" property that hangs directly off of the SilverlightTest class.
• The Microsoft.Silverlight.Testing.dll and Microsoft.Silverlight.Testing.Framework.dll assemblies have been combined into a single assembly.

Otherwise, the changes were improvements to the interface, a more discoverable and simplified API and extensibility story, bug fixes, and overall a nice polished product. Most folks inside of Microsoft have been able to make these changes in just a few minutes.

Stay tuned for the release!

More controls are coming...

In case you haven't seen Shawn Burke's blog recently, you may be missing part of an awesome story that's developing. Last week Shawn revealed that there are more controls under development in his "Control Freak" posting.

According to his post, there's a planned release at PDC of a preview of some controls, including:

• DockPanel
• WrapPanel
• ViewBox
• Label
• HeaderedContentControl
• Expander
• TreeView
• NumericUpDown
• AutoComplete
• Accordian

I haven't widely circulated it, but this probably would also be a good time for me to say "oh yeah, by the way... I've been reporting to Shawn for a while now!"

Awesome things are happening.