Today (July 10, 2009, for the record) we (or, more accurately, Microsoft, also for the record) announced the general availability of Silverlight 3 and the soon-to-release of the Expression 3 suite of tools. ScottGu offers a lot of details, but I'll summarize some of the more salient points here. (ScottGu, for those who do not know, is Scott Guthrie, a VP in our Developer Division. He's in charge of the teams that built little things like the .NET runtime, ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF and the tools for said runtimes.)

Silverlight 3
You can install the Silverlight 3 runtime from almost anywhere on Microsoft.com and on numerous third-party sites (like my personal favorite, SGU: Stargate Universe, which uses Photosynth to allow you to explore the Ancient ship Destiny; I love those shows). One of the powerful new features of Silverlight 3 is the out-of-the-browser application capabilities. With a deft set of changes to an app's config files, you can have your Silverlight 3-powered application deployed via the browser but run standalone on a desktop that has the Silverlight 3 runtime. It's a similar to click-once deployed Windows Forms applications or XBAP (XAML browser application) deployment.

Expression 3
Expression tools are built for designers through and through, enabling them to quickly design rich, interactive user experiences. But unlike other design tools, Expression uses the same solution and project formats as Visual Studio, enabling much improved workflow between the colorful, hippy, happy designer type and the black-text-on-white-background developer type. Guess which type I am. (Okay, for the smart-alecks out there, management is actually a correct type for me. But I try to hold onto my developer roots. So there!) The main cool thing Expression 3 introduces is SketchFlow, a rapid prototyping tool for user interface and user experience design.

Of course there are loads more, and the Expression site lists all the details on Expression Web (for CSS and HTML), Blend (for XAML design), the aforementioned SketchFlow, Expression Design (for creating graphics content), and Expression Encoder (for video encoding).

Although they aren't quite yet available, they will be available soon and are, in fact, available for pre-order from a number of different online retailers.