If you haven’t already heard the news, the final release of the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010 have been released! That’s great news for Silverlight developers and to top it off the crew up at Microsoft even snuck in a few new features including intellisense for styles (a big deal in my opinion) and the ability to easily manipulate Grid rows and columns.  One of the most time consuming (and boring) tasks experienced by developers is also covered with the new “Go To Value Definition” feature that allows you to jump directly to style definitions with ease.  That feature alone is worth the upgrade especially if you’re working with a large application that uses a lot of styles.

Here’s a quick run-down of the features provided by the latest release from the Microsoft team:

• Support for targeting Silverlight 4 in the Silverlight designer and project system
• RIA Services application templates and libraries to simplify access to your data services (check out this Silverlight.tv video and whitepaper giving full details)
• Support for Silverlight 4 elevated trust and out-of-browser applications
• Enhanced support for other new Silverlight 4 features, including:
• Working with Implicit Styles
• Go To Value Definition - navigate directly from controls on your page to styles that are applied to them.
• Style Intellisense - easily modify styles you already have in XAML
• Working with Data Source Window outputs
• Data Source Selector - easily select and modify your data source information
• Grid Row and Column context menu - Add, remove, and re-sort DSW outputs and other Grid layouts
• Thickness Editor for editing Margins, Padding etc.
• Sample Data Support -  see your item templates and bindings light up at design time
• Working with Silverlight 4 Out-of-Browser applications
• Automatically launch and debug your OOB app from inside the IDE
• Specify XAP signing for trusted OOB apps
• Set the OOB window characteristics

If you’d like to see some of the new features in action check out this Channel 9 video with Mark Wilson-Thomas and John Papa.