Silverlight 3 GDR2 Released

Tody Microsoft has released a minor SIlverlight v3 release filed under “general distribution release 2”. Today, if your development environment is up to date, you will notice following line of code in the SL start page:

<param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="3.0.40624.0" />

This defines the minimal version of required Silverlight runtime. That means if we install the new higher one (compatible one) your existing applications should still work. The new version has been released today is versioned as 3.0.40818.0.

The new runtime is compatible with GB18030 encoding standard. The standard, known as GB18030, replaces the existing Chinese standard GB2312/GBK. It's composary that all new products released in China after January 1, 2001 must support GB18030, which includes the existing GBK character set plus 6582 Unicode Extension-A, and 1,948 additional non-Han characters (Mongolian, Uygur, Tibetan, and Yi).

So if your app targets Chinese “small” market, then you shoud ugrade. In this case you will have to set minor version as:

<param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="3.0.40818.0" />

This will cause your users to install the new SL runtime.

For Developers

All developers should install the new developer runtime (for Windows and/or Mac). Currently there are no new Tools updates.  There are just some minor updates in the SDK which aren’t required. But, if you want all latest staffs get them here.