Silverlight 2.0 Beta is available now. So what’s new in this version compared to Silverlight 1.0/1.1? In easy words: It’s (almost) as powerful as WPF. This article will help you getting started with Silverlight 2.0 and VS 2008. We will explain the installation of the Silverlight Tools for VS 2008 and create a little Silverlight project using new Layout-functionalities and controls.

New controls
Silverlight 2.0 ships with many new controls like: CheckBox, Calendar, Grid, GridSplitter, MediaElement, ScrollViewer, StackPanel, TextBox, Slider, Tooltip… 

When using the Designer with VS 2008 and the Toolbox, it feels like you are designing a GUI for WPF. You can add eventhandlers to the controls like a Click-Handler for a Button

<Button Content="Page 1" Margin="3" Click="Button_Click"></Button>

The code of the handler looks like this:

private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    // TODO
}

Layout enhancements
The layout manager support in Silverlight 2.0 is a part Silverlight UI Framework which is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework. Other parts of this Framework which are available in Silverlight are Databinding support, Control templates and Skinning.

Base class library
Silverlight contains a .NET base class library with support for functionalities of the namespaces Collections, IO, Generics, Threading, Globalization, XML and many more.

For getting started with Silverlight 2.0 Beta and VS 2008 you will have to download the Silverlight Tools Beta1 for VS 2008 from here.

After installation the following VS project templates for Silverlight are available:

ref: http://www.codegod.de/WebAppCodeGod/Silverlight-2-0-and-ASP-NET-tutorial-Getting-started-AID474.aspx