Okay, I've been busy with other stuff in my life, I'll blog about soon. Suffice it to say, I'm going to be able to focus my time more on Silverlight now

The Silverlight team is announcing beta 2 with this post. It's a pretty long list with changes, and it's looking very good! Here are a few of my favorites:

• They included some controls into the runtime. So more goodies without added download size.
• A visual tree helper. I'm looking for more information on this. As you know, SL does not have the same concept of a seperate visual tree and logical tree as WPF does. They instead opted to not differentiate. Does this helper mean that the two models come closer to each other?
• Per binding level validation.
• Binding to attached properties! Yay!
• OnItemsChanged method
• Fallback value during conversion
• Duplex communication. Oh dear, they really hit the sweet spot here. This allows you to push data to the client during a call.

The big one for me is support for UIAutomation though. I'm not sure if it is supported fully, but this means you can test your controls with actual 'human'-like input. I think this is important when building an application with a late-bound system like Xaml-binding.

The whole blogosphere is raving about the new VisualStateManager. It is a highlevel api to work with your states. The blend team is able to give you a much improved templating story because of it. Read about it here or here.