I got a question from an attendee at Day of .NET in email. I thought I’d share the question and answers:
“Please let me know when additional WPF, Silverlight, and WCF info is available. How can I obtain these products?”
WPF and WCF – both of these are out right now at part of .NET 3.0. There is a ton of informtion out about these two technologies at http://www.netfx3.com. The technologies are free and available on Windows XP and pre-baked into Vista. Tools for code development are available for VS.NET 2005 as free downloads and are baked into VS.NET Orcas. Tools for design for WPF – you can do some in VS.NET but the design time experience is really best with Expression which has just been RTM’d.
Silverlight is freely downloadable plug-in that is still in beta. Actually, the 1.0 is stil in beta (It supports XAML and JavaScript.) but the alpha of 1.1 is already out which supports the .NET CLR. That supports C#, VB.NET and all of the other .NET languages as well as the Dynamic Language Runtime so there’s support for Python and JavaScript with Dynamic VB and Ruby on the way later this year. The tools for development for the 1.0 Beta is any text editor and Expression Blend 1.1 Alpha. The tools for development of 1.1 alpha with .NET support are available as add-ins for the VS.NET Orcas Beta and the Expression Blend 1.1 Alpha.