While I was in Florida. I was able to see some of the local sites in Orlando & Miami.
Here are a few of the photos.
my first time at Disney World. i have to say, I like Disneyland better.
balloons on main street
princess for the day
waiting for tea cups
finally, a day at the beach: my feet in miami.
the great art deco sign at the park central hotel
rooftop party
me = tan = success
Silverlight Beta2 is officially out in the wild!
All the required download links to get started are here:
Also, for the feature areas I drive, here are the major Beta2 updates:
Networking
- Wider API set for WebClient
- Upload methods for streams and strings
- Set request headers on uploads
- Threading Updates
- HttpWebRequest & WebClient are callable on a background thread
- HttpWebRequest’s delegates are called on a new non-UI thread.
- Delegates were previously always called on the UI thread.
- You must invoke back on to the UI thread if the data you’re retrieving will be consumed by a UI element.
- For an example, see the updated networking post series (part one).
- Progressive download support
- When AllowReadStreamBuffering is set to false on HttpWebRequest and WebClient, the returned request stream supports progressive Stream.BeginRead() calls.
- Cross domain URI & path character restrictictions
- Cross domain policy files
- Cross domain policy files do not allow you to send request headers by default. You must explicitly opt in to request headers in the policy file.
- For more details, see this updated networking post series (part three).
Control Model Customization
- Easier control subclassing when you don’t want to change control visuals
- The DefaultStyleKey property indicates the type that should be used to look up the built-in style (e.g. MyButton.DefaultStyleKey = typeof(MyButton)
- The runtime looks up the generic.xaml in the assembly where the DefaultStyleKey’s Type value was defined.
- It also uses the DefaultStyleKey to look up the built-in style w/in that generic.xaml’s ResourceDictionary
- DefaultStyleKey should be set in the control’s constructor
- If you sub class Button and do not set the DefaultStyleKey, you will "inherit" the Button’s built-in style
- Expansion of the Parts and States model with VisualStateManager
- This is a big one! Look for a new post coming soon explains how we’ve made control visual state & transition management easier.
Thanks everyone who attended my TechEd talks last week! As promised, here are the decks and samples from each session. When the videos get posted, I will add links. 
WUX206: An Introduction to Microsoft Silverlight Controls Framework
(slides, samples)
WUX326: Understanding the Microsoft Silverlight 2 Control Skinning Framework
(slides, samples)
Also, for fun…. I’ve uploaded my WeatherControl sample app to play with!
