These announcement days always make me feel a bit panicky. There's so much stuff being announced over at MIX that I get into a panic that I won't be able to keep up :-)

I've been doing a little playing with Silverlight 2 just recently and using Blend 2.5 and VS 2008 so that's all coming along quite nicely.

I did the installation from the chainer which is up here;

Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008

which gives you the runtime, the SDK, the bits for VS and so the only things it doesn't give you is a version of Expression Blend that you can use with Silverlight 2 so you'll need to go here;

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/download.aspx?key=blenddownloads

and, for Silverlight 2 you'll be wanting Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview. For Silverlight 1 and WPF you'll be wanting Expression Blend 2 Beta.

Now, once of the exciting things that's in Silverlight 2 is the DeepZoom technology made available via the MultiScaleImage control so if you want to try that out you can go visit here for a look at what it does;

http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

And if you want to look to compose those yourself then you'll want to go here;

Download the Preview of the Deep Zoom Composer

for the download and here;

Deep Zoom Composer User Guide

to find the instructions for it ( which I needed to read ).

Enjoy.