Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4 Coexistance - silverlight

I work on several projects with different development environments. I would like to maintain a Visual Studio 2008/Silverlight 3 environment on the same development workstation as a Visual Studio 2010/Silverlight 4 environment. If possible, I would like to be able to work on both at the same time, without using virtual machines.
Has anyone done that successfully? Is there anything special I need to do to help them coexist? I previously installed Silverlight 4, and it prevented me from working in the Visual Studio 2008/Silverlight 3 environment. But it is possible that I did something wrong in the setup.

I don't think the two can coexist next to each other. You will either need to make a VM with the specified configuration, or specify the SL version in Visual Studio.
Can you ellaborate why you can't run you SL3 project in VS 2008?

Could you use VS 2010 for your SL3 work? VS 2010 includes multi-targeting capabilities, and is compatible with Silverlight 3 out of the box. SL4 support is added with the SL4 development tools, so at that point it supports both.
You can pick which Silverlight version you want each project to be either at project creation time (for new projects), or in the project Properties (for existing projects).

Related

Can Surface SDK run on Visual Studio 2012?

I need to create a WPF app using the Surface SDK. I am using Visual Studio 2012, and according to this SO post, VS2012 doesn't allow that. However, since this was posted before it was officially released, I want to make sure I'm not missing something.
I just need a few of the touch/swipe controls that come with it. Is there a different option for VS2012? The other developer is using 2010, so it needs to be able to still run on his machine. It's a very simple app that I just need to hammer out, so I'm looking for the fastest, easiest method. Both of us and the end application is to run on Windows 7.
I found an easy solution by which it seems to work. It does expect you to have Visual Studio 2010 installed. Following the following steps I managed to compile in Visual Studio 2012 using .NET 4.5. TouchDown events work. I tried it out on some small projects and they seem to work perfectly fine.
Use Visual Studio 2010 to set up a Surface project.
Safe and close Visual Studio 2010.
Open the solution using Visual Studio 2012.
Change the target framework under project settings to .NET 4.5.
Save as a new solution file.
Compile, ... everything works!
This method prevents you from having to set up all the configuration files/references yourself. The only downside is you don't have any of the Surface tools integrated into the IDE. E.g. the toolbox, project templates, ... This of course doesn't prevent you from writing plain XAML yourself.
If for some reason this doesn't work in the long run I will update this post.
The easiest way will unfortunately be for you to run VS2010.
Currently the SDK is not supported in VS2012, for a few reasons.
Notably, the way that touch works in Win8 is a lot better than in previous versions of Windows. This unfortunately meant a rewrite of the touch layer that the Surface SDK uses. The new controls are written to adapt dynamically based on mouse/touch input, making the Surface SDK controls a bit redundant.
Microsoft might make the SDK available for VS2012 in the future, but this is kind of debatable.
If you are still dead set on giving it a shot, download an application called Orca (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa370557(v=vs.85).aspx) and edit the SDK installer file, removing the dependency on VS2010.
This is how I got the Surface 1 SDK to work with VS2010, since it was targeting VS2008 (note that it still has not been updated to work with VS2010)
Let me know how you go.

Installing Silverlight 4 Toolkit without Visual studio 2010 (for build server)

I have just been informed that the Silverlight 4 Toolkit (latest download) requires the prior installation of VS 2010.
We are setting up an automated build server for a very large Silverlight Prism project and would prefer not to do a full install of VS 2010 on an unmanned build machine.
Is VS 2010 actually required for an install of the Silverlight 4 Toolkit?
Why is it required?
Is it possible to work around this (copy specific pieces from another Dev machine?)
Thanks in advance for any information.
The problem with this is that it doesn't install the msbuild tasks. I have found that it is possible to install just the SDK by extracting it from the tools download. For details see here: http://neilsleightholm.blogspot.com/2010/09/building-silverlight-4-applications.html.
Don't install the Toolkit at all. In these large controlled scenarios you would probably want to copy the toolkit dlls to folder owned by your change control system anyway.
Ultimately the toolkit is just a set of dlls. On install it does other things to make using it as a developer convenient in VS and Blend but it has no special requirements at build time.

how to setup VS 2010 to allow debugging of Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4

I have some code which is in Silverlight 3. I am unable to move to SL4 at this time.
I would however like to use VS 2010 to do my SL 3 development... and SL4 development.
The idea of both runtimes coexisting on 1 machine i thought I heard Microsoft got
right this time in VS 2010.
is this correct?
if yes, then Where can I find the instructions how to set this up?
thanks for any help you can provide,
Sincerely,
J
Silverlight is not side-by-side. VS 2010 provides multi-targeting support for the full .NET framework, which is side-by-side, but NOT Silverlight.
There can only be one version of the Silverlight plugin and runtime on the machine.
That said, if you want to build code targeting one or the other, that is possible by checking in the Silverlight versions to your source enlistment. This post is a little outdated but provides an example for doing this for SL2 and SL3.

Can we still develop Silverlight 2 applications

I've inherited a set of Silverlight 2 applications (new job), one of which needs upgrading. We can do the updates in code without problems, but the available dev machines all appear to be running Silverlight 3.
I can't seem to find Silverlight 2 tools for download any more - is there a way to multi-target Silverlight the same way we can multi-target older versions of the main CLR?
thanks
Toby
There's really no reason to multitarget Silverlight. Unlike CLR, there isn't a side-by-side story: people run the latest version.
There's still an argument to develop for Silverlight 3, so go ahead and use the Silverlight 3 development tools - your Silverlight 2 apps should work just fine.
There may be some extremely limited, controlled environments without Internet or IT connectivity with Silverlight 2, but I'd expect that to be vary rare in my opinion. In such a case you could use MSBuild to build Silverlight 2 (even if you have newer bits on your machine) by placing the build tasks in your enlistment and redirecting from the standard SDK: http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2009/03/sxs-sl2-sl3-building/
Here are the Silverlight 2 tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1. You won't be able to developer Silverlight 2 apps in VS2010: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=c22d6a7b-546f-4407-8ef6-d60c8ee221ed&displaylang=en

Difference between silverlight tools, silverlight SDK, silverlight toolkit, silverlight development tools

I'm installing a programming environment for Silverlight and trying to straighten out what needs to be installed, feedback is appreciated:
At http://silverlight.net/GetStarted, point number one allows you to install "Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1". The book (Silverlight 2, Wiley) that I am reading seems to refer to this as the "Silverlight SDK".
Also at http://silverlight.net/GetStarted, point number four allows you to install "Silverlight Toolkit" which my book refers to as "Silverlight Development Tools".
So the way I understand it, there are only 2 things to install, the names just seem to not be consistent. Or are there really 3 or 4 different things to install?
You're correct:
- the first one refers to the actual SDK (along with documentation, Visual Studio templates and examples). You must install this one in order to develop a Silverlight 2 web application.
- the second one is a collection of controls and classes already coded and ready to be used in any Silverlight 2 web application. This one is not required but you can find it very useful since it's a community project, constantly mantained and updated with new features.

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