Late last night, Scott Guthrie announced that the Beta2 for Silverlight 2 , a new version of the VS2008 tools (compatible with the SP1 Beta) and a new CTP of Expression Blend were released. Scott's post includes a detailed list (with the usual screenshots and instructions that Scott spoils us with) of changes and enhancements.

You can get the new goodies here.

There are a lot, but what caught my attention the most was the State Visualization. What this lets you do (and using Expression) is create different visual effects for a control based on its state without having to use triggers or events to accomplish this. It will reduce a huge amount of XAML coding that you would otherwise have to perform.

I opened up an existing Silverlight 2.0 app that I wrote for an upcoming MSDN Magazine article (August issue) on using the InkPresenter and noted a few changes.

1) The InkPresenter made it into the Visual Studio Silverlight Tools Toolbar.
2) There was a small API change (a sensible one) with respect to the StylusPoints collection (the group of points of things as well as the act of collecting the points).

Before: //newstroke.StylusPoints.AddStylusPoints(e.GetStylusPoints(inkP)); After: newstroke.StylusPoints.Add(e.StylusDevice.GetStylusPoints(inkP));

3) If you have tooltips in your controls, note that the API has changed which impacts the XAML in the following way:

Before: ToolTip="Click here to see something cool happen"
After: ToolService.ToolTip="Click here to see something cool happen"

Because of the API changes, Beta2 is not backwards compatible with Beta1. If users update Silverlight to use Beta2 apps, then any Beta1 apps they attempt to access will not work. So the recommendation is to update your existing apps which shouldn't be too hard as far as I have seen.