For those of you following Silverlight news, Microsoft has released the next pre-final version of Silverlight 1.0. According to the source:

“we’re homing in on the launch of Silverlight 1.0, and today marks another milestone with the launch of the first release candidate. Since the beta we released at [MIX'07], we’ve fixed approximately 2000 bugs and work items and we’re now feature complete with the final JavaScript-based API. This version of the runtime is vastly more stable than the beta release: our stress test runs show improvements of two or three orders of magnitude in many cases, and the product demonstrates the polish one might expect from a near-final release.

“Along with the 1.0 RC1 release, we’ve also refreshed the 1.1 bits. We’ve not exposed any significant changes in the .NET extensions, but the 1.1 “alpha refresh” includes the same core runtime as 1.0 RC1. A note on installation: if you have the beta release on your machine, there’s no need to uninstall - simply run the RC1 installer and it will overwrite the existing binaries on your machine.”

There has been some confusion between why Microsoft would have two pre-release versions being developed in parallel: 1.0 beta and 1.1 alpha. To clear up the confusion, Silverlight 1.0 has the core set of features of Silverlight proper and is limited to JavaScript as it’s scripting language. 1.1 has the core features of Silverlight proper (and the beta has now been “refreshed” to include all the bug-fixes and whatnot in the 1.0 RC1 update) and has the advantage of “managed code” (pick your language in ASP.NET) rather than ONLY JavaScript, it also has some additional features not in the core code.

The Silverlight runtime itself:

• Silverlight 1.0 RC1 / Windows (direct link)
• Silverlight 1.0 RC1 / Mac (direct link)
• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh / Windows (direct link)
• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh / Mac (direct link)

Some tools for building Silverlight applications:

• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
• Visual Studio Extensions for Silverlight
• Silverlight 1.0 SDK / Silverlight 1.1 SDK
• ASP.NET Futures CTP
• Expression Blend August Preview
• Expression Media Encoder Template Updater

Also of note, Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX Futures has been updated and includes some additional Silverlight-compatible features (download the Microsoft ASP.NET Futures (July 2007) Release here).