Bill Gates announced the availability of a new build of Silverlight at his TechEd keynote, and now the new version, Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is available for download. I won’t get into all the new features and improvements in the latest version, but if you’re interested in what Silverlight can do, there’s a nice Showcase on the Silverlight website:

One interesting change, noticed by our friend Picturepan2 over at LiveSino.net, is that the Silverlight powered MSN Toolbar, which worked on Silverlight 1.0 but not Silverlight 2 Beta 1, now indeed does work on Silverlight 2 Beta 2.  The toolbar will, in addition to running the MSN Toolbar, provide the backbone for the Live Search toolbar that will be pre-installed on all new HP computers starting next year.  Presumably that also will include the gadget and API features that are to be included in the MSN Toolbar later this year.

You can download and try out the MSN Toolbar here, in case you didn’t want to go back to Silverlight 1.0 to try it out.

(oh, and we just can’t resist noting that 3 of the products with tabs on the Live Search section of the toolbar have been killed:

…hopefully it is easily updated!)