Just when I was getting used to SL 3, Scott Guthrie announced today at PDC that SL 4 Beta is now available at silverlight.net. Among the new features he demonstrated:
He also mentioned that SL 4 "has" MVVM. Hm. Like a project template similar to RIA Services? Or they built it on that pattern? Not sure what he meant. Speaking of RIA it is now a first class citizen in TFS 2010. Also, they made improvements to it and made it a native WCF service. That's pretty sweet. It enables something I've been wanting, namely, the ability to employ service orientation for the middle tier and abstract that away from the caller. If RIA Services is a WCF service then SL can call it, an ASP.NET web page can call it, a mobile device, a portal page, and so on. I hate the idea of middle tier plumbing being compiled over and over again in local APPBASE dirs for each of these clients.
