At the PDC Conference today, The Gu unveiled the first public release of Silverlight 4 (Beta). This release has some really great additions, but I am most excited about the advances in Business Application Development for Silverlight.

Why will Silverlight 4 be better for Business App Development?

1. RIA Services
   WCF RIA Services (formerly .NET RIA Services) makes it quick and easy to create a Service layer that wraps your Data Access Layer - whether your DAL uses the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL, or another technology. Note the name change from ".NET RIA Services" to "WCF RIA Services." As confusing as another name change is, this helps clarify that this new release is built on top of WCF - The communications channel from the Silverlight client to the RIA Domain Service is now a *.svc file - which means we can Add a Service reference to the service side, get WSDL, and customize WCF service settings.
   
   
2. Cider Support
   VS2010 includes a XAML editor (Cider), supporting drag/drop forms design and data binding. In the past, developers needed to learn Blend to do basic GUI form design. Don't get me wrong, I love Blend : and we will still need to switch over to Blend to take advantage of Behaviors, States, Templating, animation, drawing, and other tasks. But many developers were turned off by the fact that Visual Studio had no WYSIWYG designer for XAML.
   
   
3. Data Sources Window
   WCF RIA Services and VS2010 now support a rapid Drag/Drop design experience which allows you to quickly put together data-enabled Silverlight applications.
   

Getting Started with Silverlight 4 Beta

Here are some links to get you past the burn and into the groove...

Silverlight 4 Beta, RIA Services... and Beer!
I've updated my Beer database demo with a walkthrough for Silverlight 4, VS2010, and the latest RIA Services.

Silverlight 4 Beta: Implicit Styles
We've been waiting for this little feature for awhile! Finally we can set a global style for a control.

Silverlight 4 Beta - A Guide
This is a great overview of new stuff from Tim Heuer.

Silverlight 4 Tech Whitepaper
John Papa walks through lots of the new goodies in SL4.

Video Resources *UPDATED*

Silverlight 4 Beta Videos on silverlight.net
Tim H. has been busy indeed, and has published a slew of videos for Silverlight 4 including most of the new toys!

PDC09 Videos
At this point, they're just starting to trickle in, but keep checking here for drops of the session recordings from PDC09! Day 2 has all of the Silverlight goodies.