This week Silverlight 2 came one step closer to release, Adobe unveiled Creative Suite 4, the Dojo toolkit pushes out a new release, Lee Brimelow gives a tour of the new Flash, Silverlight announces a UK tour, and Kevin Lynch of Adobe talks about the future.

FEATURED: Silverlight 2 Release Candidate

This week, Microsoft released Silverlight 2 RC0, bringing Silverlight 2 one step closer to a final release. It is important to note that this is a developer release, and it is aimed at assisting developers in migrating Beta 2 applications to final 2.0 standard. A public runtime version is not available for this release.

Scott Guthrie of Microsoft gave a detailed run-down of what is available with this release:

Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems.

A link to Scott's complete blog post is available below, and it gives more details about what will be coming in the weeks and months ahead.

Scott Guthrie (Microsoft): Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available

Tim Heuer (Microsoft): Silverlight 2 RC0 Released for Developers

Adobe Unveils Creative Suite 4

This week, Adobe unveiled the new Creative Suite in a live webcast. This release includes new versions of all of the Creative Suite applications. One of the main highlights of CS4 is a deeper integration between the applications.

Probably the most relevant release for RIA developers is the release of Flash CS4. Flash CS4 is the first release of the Flash IDE to target Flash Player 10, and it also provides better integration with developers working in Flex. In addition, AIR application creation is now available in Flash without an extension.

While the suite was unveiled this week, the applications will not be made available to the public until October 15. Links to the webcast, product page, and a developer's assessment from Ryan Stewart are below.

AdobeTV: Creative Suite 4 Launch Broadcast

Adobe: Creative Suite 4 Experience

ars technica: Adobe launches CS4 suite of applications

Ryan Stewart (Adobe): CS4 - A Developer's New Best Friend

Dojo Toolkit 1.2 RC1

The first release candidate for version 1.2 of the Dojo Toolkit was made available this week. This release brings many new features to the developer. Over 1000 changes and fixes were put into place for version 1.2.

DojoToolkit.org: Dojo 1.2 A Proper Candidate

Ajaxian: Dojo Toolkit 1.2 RC1 is Out!

Silverlight Touring the UK

Shawn Wildermuth announced that Saffron Interactive is the latest company to partner with the Silverlight tour. They will be teaching several of the classes in the UK. This extends the reach of the current Silverlight Tour and will include more European stops.

Shawn Wildermuth: The Silverlight Tour in the UK

Curl Nitro Goes to Beta 2

Curl recently released the second beta for Curl 7.0, Nitro. This beta adds to the current functionality and brings several new features to the forefront including:

Enhanced application performance through improved compiler register allocation, New default look and feel for controls, Ability for Curl applets to control page views when using the embedded browser API, Support for encryption in SQLite APIs, Ability to leverage the newly released Curl Development tools for Eclipse (CDE).

This new beta version is available now at Curl.com.

Curl.com: Curl Releases Curl 7.0 Nitro Beta 2

Adobe CTO Discusses The Future

Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe, talked with the people at eWeek at length about topics such as the future of the Flash Player, Adobe's plan for the mobile platform, cloud computing, and the upcoming Max conference. This interview is a must read for developers working on the Adobe platform to get a view of the direction Adobe will be taking over the months ahead.

eWeek: Adobe Talks Open Source, Innovation and the Future of Flash

New Features in Flash CS4

Lee Brimelow of Adobe gave a screencast this week that demonstrated many of the new features included in Flash CS4. This screencast illustrated the IK support, native 3D support, new tween and animation tooling, and the new UI for the new version of Flash.

Lee Brimelow (Adobe): Flash CS4 Feature Tour

Expression Encoder Announces H.264 Support

TIm Heuer of Microsoft stated this week on his blog that the next refresh of the Expression Encoder will be version 2 SP1. He also stated that this version will include many features that will be useful for Silverlight developers including H.264 encoding support as well as a Silverlight template directly in the product. Other features include WebDAV publishing and numerous bug fixes.

This version of Expression Encoder will be made available before the end of the year.

Tim Heuer: Expression Encoder 2 SP1 Announced

MSDN: Announcing Expression Encoder 2 SP1