New Microsoft Betas
On Wednesday, Microsoft released a whole horde of beta software. Firstly there is the first beta of Internet Explorer 8, which has better standards support as well as new features such as Activities and Web Slices.
They also released beta 1 of Silverlight 2. This brings .NET support to Silverlight, so it can be programmed using C# or any other .NET language. Controls are also available now, so you can use things like text boxes and buttons in Silverlight. A Visual Studio plugin for creating Silverlight 2 applications has also been released, as well as a preview release of Expression Blend 2.5.
There are also beta versions of Expression Studio 2 available for download. Expression Web 2 brings support for PHP, as well as improving on the features of Expression Web 1. The other parts of Expression Studio also have new features.