If you’ve been following the coverage of the TechEd Developers conference you will have picked up on the announcement that the next beta of Silverlight 2 is going to be released this week. Well, it’s now here! Scott Guthrie has a great write up of all the improvements over the previous beta, so I won’t repeat them here. You can download all the bits here.

It’s funny because Silverlight isn’t something I’ve looked into a great deal yet, but I have been delving into WPF a fair bit, and in particular I’m a big fan of Expression Blend. Blend really helped me learn WPF initially as it was easy to experiment with different layouts and controls, and see the XAML that expressed this. But what really helped me learn was Adam Nathan’s superb book Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed. If you want to learn WPF I’d encourage you to grab yourself a copy of Adam’s book and download the preview of Blend. You’ll master WPF in no time!