Good news for RIA lovers : Silverlight is now really present in Sharepoint 2010!

Here is the message you may read if you go to the menu "More Options" of the Site Actions menu if you don't have Silverlight installed.

That doesn't mean that you can't do anything but here is how the options dialog looks like :

If you install the Silverlight plug-in, here is the new look of this dialog :

It's hard to show with a snapshot but this new presentation is really nice, with small animations and fluent navigation.

More than that, Microsoft added a new Silverlight Web Part. It has never been so easy to run a Silverlight application inside Sharepoint.

To use this Web Part, simply edit a Web Part page and add a new Web Part.

In the categories, choose Media and Content and then the Silverlight Web Part :

A new dialog will then appear asking for the silverlight XAP URL :

Enter the URL of a XAP (hosted in a document library, in the 14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS folder or anywhere else). In my case, I'll reuse a Silverlight XAP hosted in the IIS hosting my blog.

Here is the result :

Of course, you can modify the URL, appearance, layout and other stuffs in the editor part.

If time permits, I'll write another post about the new Client Object Model an how to use it in a Silverlight application.