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Eugene Osovetsky made a pretty exciting announcement yesterday regarding pushing data to Silverlight in Beta 2.

Beta 2 will likely include a new WCF capability for duplex services based on DuplexReceiver<T>. IMHO, this helps eliminate socket coding for some of the more common scenarios:

• Chat applications
• Data update notifications in biz apps

There will be both a client (Silverlight) and a server (WCF) component to this. In the spirit of keeping Silverlight's core platform agnostic, the client-side piece will be shipped as an extension assembly that you can include in your application as needed.

Having gone the socket route for a chat application demo I wrote (screenshot above), this is a very welcome addition. I was never proud of the sockets mush I put together in that (which is why the source is by-request only, I don't think it was a good pattern to follow), and would be happy to convert it to this new pattern.

Keep in mind this is all pre-release information and may or may not reflect what finally shows up in Beta 2 or RTW.

More information on Eugene's blog here.