Silverlight 4 RTW Release Binaries are out

The release-to-the-web (RTW) version of Silverlight 4 is available for free download, as of April 15, as Microsoft officials said it would be earlier this week.

As per Silverlight.net

Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for Web, desktop, and mobile applications when online or offline. Silverlight is a free plug-in, powered by the .NET framework and compatible with multiple browsers, devices and operating systems, bringing a new level of interactivity wherever the Web works. For information on the new features in Silverlight, and how it compares to previous versions, be sure to visit the overview and feature matrix page. For additional information, including details on the features, visit the Silverlight 4 Information Page.

Silverlight is a browser plug-in that supports multimedia content. It also is a slimmed-down, cross-platform version of Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) programming model. Each successive iteration of Silverlight includes more and more WPF functionality (and vice versa).

Silverlight 4 adds support for data binding, enterprise networking and printing, and lots of other features that are likely to make the platform more appealing to folks writing not just single-function, lightweight Web apps, but enterprise apps, as well. Microsoft’s Tim Heuer has links to the full list of Silverlight 4 features on his blog.

Silverlight also is Microsoft’s primary development environment for Windows Phone 7 devices, but the current Silverlight  mobile dev platform is a hybrid of Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, not pure Silverlight 4. Microsoft officials have said that Silverlight won’t be running (as an Internet Explorer plug-in, at least) on the first Windows Phone 7 devices that ship by this holiday season.

If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed, get everything you need for Silverlight 4 RTW development by downloading the Silverlight 4 Tools RC2 for Visual Studio.

That means Silverlight 4.0 plug in has been released to the web(RTW) and available to download as your browser plugin. But for Visual Studio 2010 developement tools for Silerlight 4, it still in RC2(Release Candidate 2), which works well with RTM version of Visual Studio 2010.

So download the Silverlight 4 Tools RC2 for Visual Studio 2010 and start your development.

One important note for developers, as acknowledged on the Silverlight download site:

“Visual Studio 2010 can be installed side-by-side with Visual Studio 2008 SP1. For Silverlight 4 development, you will need the released version of Visual Studio 2010. Please read the known issue on installing Visual Studio 2010 if you already have the Silverlight 3 SDK installed.”