Silverlight, if you recall, appears to be Microsoft's answer to Adobe's AIR platform.

Microsoft released Silverlight 2.0 today, as expected. Part of the big exciting news is that you can now code up Silverlight applications in Eclipse. Yeah, not kidding. I know, you just hit weather.com too and checked to see what the temperature was. But seriously, Microsoft is fully supportive of the Eclipse environment for Silverlight despite its own support with its own free tool, Visual Web Developer Express. I haven't checked out the Eclipse version yet, so I'll be interested to see it and hear how well it competes with Visual Web Developer Express (which would admittedly be hard to do) in terms of developing with XAML.

You can read many of the juicy tips and find all the relevant links about the new version at Scott Hanselman's always excellent blog.

Need to learn XAML so you can make the most of Silverlight and get creating some cool apps?

Are you going to be at Dr. Dobb's SD Best Practices?

If you are, stop by the F5 booth and score a signed copy of XAML in a Nutshell.

And then ask us how we can secure, scale, and deliver Silverlight/XAML-based applications.