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In Expression Blend, we’ve been thinking for a loooong time about how to make it ever easier to create great animated visual effects quickly on top of the Silverlight and WPF runtimes. We’ve been looking at large-scale animation needs since Blend 2 SP1 and steadily building features to address those needs, and we think we’ve reached critical mass. With Blend 4, we have a compelling set of technologies that work very well together.

In this blog post Jeff Prosise talks about one of the more obscure features introduced in Silverlight 3 - the {RelativeSource} markup extension.

 It's poorer than its counterpart in WPF because the Silverlight version supports only two modes: Self and TemplatedParent. There are precious few examples out there demonstrating why you'd ever need {RelativeSource} in Silverlight. Here's one example.

One feature I would like to mention is intellisense. When working on smaller projects, you do not have to leave Blend to edit some code. It can be done right in Blend now, which becomes very handy when dealing with events for example. Intellisense even works when editing Xaml files.

Today at the See the Light event Microsoft announced the final release of Silverlight 3 and the upcoming Expression 3 design tools. There are a lot of changes and new things, too. Be sure to get intact with them, so you can bring the new Silverlight 3 features into your applications. To do so visit our Get Started page, go to Silverlight.net or check out some of the latest posts about the new release:

• Silverlight 3 Released by Scott Guthrie
• Silverlight 3 RTW overview by Martin Mihaylov
• Silverlight 3 Released! What is new/changed? by Tim Heuer
• What’s New In Silverlight 3 Wiki by Jesse Liberty

The official release of Silverlight 3 is already a fact and at Silverlight.net you can find the latest files for download. For more information on how to get started with the new Silverlight 3, pay a visit to our Get Started page.

With the official release there are a lot of changes that will affect in some way the Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 Beta applications. As the list of changes is pretty long, I will overview only the most interesting of them, but to be fully intact with the new release and to convert your application as fast and easy as possible, be sure to read this breaking changes document, provided by the Silverlight SDK team.