Today on the Official Microsoft Silverlight site http://www.silverlight.net is the announcement we have all been waiting for:

It’s been just three short years since the first release of Silverlight, and truly amazing to see where things are at. I’ve been extremely privileged to have had opportunities to work with the product team along the way through a number of releases now, and it’s been a remarkable experience. The teams involved represent an amazing group of talented individuals  with an unbelievable passion for their work, and it shows. My hat goes off to each an every one of them for being a part of reaching such a major milestone in a very short period of time. Well done my friends, well done!

Silverlight 4 is a major release with many new features including:

Local Fonts, Printing, Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), Webcam and Microphone support, Audio/Video Output protection, Multitask Networking, Offline DRM, Trusted Applications, IDistpatch COM interop, Group policy object support, Full keyboard in out-of-browser for trusted applications, Cross-domain network access for trusted applications, Custom window Chrome, Out of browser window settings (Position, size, etc), Web Browser Control and Web Browser Brush, Notification Toast, and Right-to-Left / BiDi text.

In addition, Silverlight’s support for major browsers included Firefox, Safari, IE has been increased to include Google Chrome on both the Mac and Windows.

As you download the RTW (Release To Web) of the client, you may notice that some of the tools downloads are still RC. Fear not, the runtime is the finished SL4, but because the tools needed the runtime to complete before the could do a final wrap there’s a slight lag. Rather than wait to release everything, these pretty darn close to final tools (My words, not theirs) have been made available at the same time as the completed runtime so we can all get our SL 4 apps built for RTW and out on the web, with the final versions  of the tools expected in the near future as a “minor update”. (Tim Heuer has more details in the this post Silverlight 4 released. Availability of tools announcement )

The Silverlight Toolkit has also been updated with an April 2010 release which has a number of enhancements including new Charting Controls, a new Context Menu control, new Themes, a new PanelDragDropTarget, as well as other improvements. For more information check out the Silverlight Toolkit April 2010 changes

Now go my friends and code!

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