Less than a year after sending out Beta 1, Microsoft released the final version of Silverlight 2 in October. According to Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s .NET Developer Division, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines in the past four weeks. What’s next you ask? Silverlight 3 of course. Guthrie’s latest blog post underlines how Silverlight 2 is being implemented by various companies across the web, but more interestingly, it also sheds some light on what’s planned for the next release:
"Silverlight 3 will include major media enhancements (including H.264 video support), major graphics improvements (including 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration), as well as major application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls). Note these are just a small sampling of the improvements—we have plenty of additional cool features we are going to keep up our sleeves a little longer. Next year Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express will also support a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight, and add tool support for data-binding."

Source: One Microsoft Way