Just as promised, Silverlight 3 has been released, actually 1 day earlier than the expected July 10th date. You can get the latest tools here.

For those of us who have been already playing with Silverlight 3 beta, there are some breaking changes. The most obvious one is that the System.Web.Silverlight assembly has been removed, meaning that the ASP.NET Silverlight control that we were using won't work anymore. Alternately, you need to set up your Silverlight app using an object and an iframe tag. The object tag shouldn't be new to anyone and was always an alternative to using the Silverlight control. The iframe will be used to handle browser history, which comes along with the new SL3 Navigation features.

To view a full list of the changes, go here:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dnkk749_0czvc86gx

I've been developing my personal website in Silverlight 3 beta as a way to learn the new features. However, today I needed to begin development on a website that will be going live fairly soon. As Silverlight 3 isn't projected to be released until maybe July or August (and it could very well be even later), I was forced to choose Silverlight 2. Unfortunately, you can't develop for Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 at the same time on the same box. As I'm opposed to using VM's these days after losing about a year of my life due to slow VM performance in the past, I searched google and was lucky enough to find this article:

http://blogs.msdn.com/amyd/archive/2009/03/18/switching-from-silverlight-3-tools-to-silverlight-2-tools.aspx

It gives you a nice .bat script that will automate most of the process of going between SL2 and SL3 so that you can easily switch between the 2 by clicking a few Next buttons and waiting 1-2 minutes. Problem solved!