Microsoft announced that Silverlight 2 is now releasing out of BETA and all the development tools and runtime updates will be available for download shortly. 

A new announcement is providing support for the Eclipse IDE, hence allowing Java developers and other Eclipse developers to stay within their familiar development environment while developing with Silverlight 2.  This has been done in collaboration with Soyatec, an international software company and a major Eclipse solutions provider.

The Eclipse tools website (with screenshots) is available at http://www.eclipse4sl.org/ 

If you have still been having your application on Silverlight 2 BETA 2, this is the time to upgrade your application.  There are a bunch of breaking changes and it is important to know that visitors who will auto-update to the latest version of the Silverlight plug-in will end up having a broken experience if your website is still using BETA 2.  Take a look at the breaking changes document and Tim Heuer’s excellent post on what steps developers should take to upgrade their applications.

The official Microsoft PressPass article with more details on the plug-in deployment statistics and features is available here.

Have fun developing!