Last week, Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 for public release.  Silverlight 2 Beta 1 was a developer release and it was announced at Mix08.  There are some great sessions that you can view (via a Silverlight viewer) at the VisitMix site

In case you are new to Silverlight – it is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

To learn more detail about the Beta 2 release, see ScottGu’s Blog.  One of my colleagues, David Chou has a great post listing resources and links to great sample Silverlight apps.  Additionally, my colleague Sam Chenaur also provides a good blog post / resource for learning about Silverlight.

As David points out in his post, people tend to position Silverlight as catching up to Flash (in its “infancy” is how David described it).  However, I think that is fair only as it relates to Silverlight 1.  Silverlight 2 is a much more complete platform with significant value and flexibility as a platform enabling many implementation choices.  It delivers on some of the great .Net capabilities, enabling the developer to create a much wider range of applications for the browser or device, and across platforms.

In addition to some of the samples David lists in his blog post, you can also find more at the Silverlight Showcase.