In 2008 Artur Carvalho asked for an Alternative IDE for Silverlight and was told to look at Visual Studio Express.
Is that still the valid answer in 2010 or are there other IDEs one should consider (cost/ OS it runs on / stability)?
I'm trying to get a feel for silverlight development before commiting cash. So I don't need enterprize level tools or a license to distribute ..
Would MonoDevelop and Moonlight be an option?
On Windows I haven't heard about anything besides Visual Studio Express 2010. On Mac you can use Eclipse for Silverlight.
As for me, I don't develop SL daily rather occasionally and starting with Blend 3 I can actually use Blend for most of my smaller personal projects and don't bother to install VS although I have a licence for it. Blend now has a decent support for Intellisense and most UI stuff is easier in Blend. Yes, Blend is not free.
Related
I just installed Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise and selected Desktop-Development for .net features.
Now when I'm starting up Visual Studio and create a new WPF project, theres no advanced objects in the toolbox like the arc Control or more Effects other than BlurEffect and DropShadowEffect. These and many others are just missing. When I look in the object browser in Visual Studio Blend, I can't find them there either.
Do I need to install something else explicitly?
Okay so I found it out: You have to manually select "Blend for Visual Studio SDK for .NET" in the Components section of the installer. This will actually install all the advanced WPF Controls, which where missing for me.
Those where always installed from VS Installer versions 2012, 2013 and 2015 automatically (its a package of 100mb).
I can just imagine that the Idea of a much more modular installer led the designers there to think "we need to make the installation faster so push out every little package that was used commonly throughout the last 5 years.".
And then they thought: "BUT hey, when it comes to the Xamarin installation, let's KEEP IN all the Google-Emulators for Android which pack a WHOPPING 17 GB!!!"
They surely thought also: "Most people wont need these, since they either have a android device on their own or they use one of our emulators, which are vtx enabled, so 10 times faster than googles emulators, and ours also only need 1 GB of disk-space. But well, we wanted to make a fast installer after all, so let it pack our customers drives full of stuff they don't need at all".
You can right-click on a category in the toolbox and click on the "Choose items" option and try to find the tools that you are missing:
visual studio 2010 toolbox standard controls missing
Blend is more design friendly than Visual Studio though so you shouldn't be suprised if you see more options in Blend. After all, Visual Studio is a programming/coding tool and Blend is a design tool.
You rarely (or never) use the toolbox to add elements to a WPF view in a "real-world scenario. In fact it is quote common to disable the designer altogether: http://blog.spinthemoose.com/2013/03/24/disable-the-xaml-designer-in-visual-studio/. If you are a serious WPF developer you should really learn XAML and MVVM :)
I'd like to ask anyone out there whether is possible, as of today, to develop a Windows/MacOS cross platform application using WPF (in Visual Studio) and Xamarin.Mac (in Xamarin Studio for Mac). I searched the web, twitted people (Stuart, I know you pointed me to loqu8 build some days ago, but I'm just stuck :P) but nothing really useful came up. So, my questions are:
First and foremost: is it possible?
Is it production ready? If not, how much stable it is? Are there any plans for improving it in the next months?
How do I use MvvmCross in Xamarin Studio, since it seems that NuGet isn't supported on MacOS, and NuGet packages don't target Xamarin.Mac anyway?
How do I create a PCL in Visual Studio since Xamarin.Mac isn't insalled on Windows? Do I have to create it on MacOS and the copy the project in Visual Studio?
More could follow...
Thanks for any answers!
First and foremost: is it possible?
Yes. Several developers have used it.
But it's not a "main target" for MvvmCross - our main focus is still on Windows, Droid and iOS which is what users have requested the most.
Is it production ready? If not, how much stable it is? Are there any plans for improving it in the next months?
It's not included in the main nuget packages - because nuget doesn't really support monomac or xammac packages very well. There are no plans to change this that I know of.
You have to build it yourself. You can do this from the main mvvmcross repo - or from branches like https://github.com/loqu8/MvvmCross/ who have done a lot of work on it.
How do I use MvvmCross in Xamarin Studio, since it seems that NuGet isn't supported on MacOS, and NuGet packages don't target Xamarin.Mac anyway?
Currently the best advice is to build and use the assemblies yourself.
How do I create a PCL in Visual Studio since Xamarin.Mac isn't insalled on Windows? Do I have to create it on MacOS and the copy the project in Visual Studio?
You can add additional PCL targets using the XML files - see old posts like http://slodge.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/cross-platform-winrt-monodroid.html about how we previously did this for MonoDroid/Touch
To build MonoMac/XamMac projects in VS, see http://tofutim.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/adding-monomac-and-xammac-to-visual.html
Cross platform WPF = speaking language of all people around the world in the best way possible
Cross platform WPF+(Blend and Visual Studio) = Doing poetry for all languages around the world in the best way possible
What better tool a programmer on the earth could wish for?
C# will become the most powerful cross platform programming languae
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.
I already own Visual Studio 2008 Team Version, and have an MSDN subscription...and I am an experienced ASP.Net developer.
What do I need to install to do Silverlight development, and can all of those tools be installed alongside my current "production" development machine (want to make sure there will not be any side effects).
I know I want to learn silverlight, but its not clear to me which tools are required and/or recommended in order to get started...
Thanks.
Download the Silverlight 2.0 SDK and Visual Studio 2008 Tools
Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2 Software Development Kit
Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
Check here for the links
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4E03409A-77F3-413F-B108-1243C243C4FE&displaylang=en
Another great resource is the original:
http://www.asp.net/downloads/
AND
http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/
Hope this helps:
Andrew :-)
This link has pretty much every thing you need.
If you're already comfortable with VS development, you can just develop Silverlight in VS by downloading the Microsoft Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008.
If you're more of a designer than devloper, then Microsoft Expression Studio may be better for you.
Follow the steps here:-
http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/
I have no problems using this stuff side-by-side with my regular development
Silverlight.net is a good place to start. All the tools are finalized so you should be able to install all things silverlight and be fine.
I am also trying to get started with Silverlight development.
Here is how I was getting started.
1.) To set up development environment: Getting started with Silverlight
2.) Web Sites to keep up with.
MSDN Silverlight Development Center
Shawn Wildermuth: He has turn from an ADO guy to a Silverlight guru/trainer.
Scott Gu's Silverlight tagged stories
I have Visual Studio 2003/5/8(+Resharper 4.1) installed on my machine along side siliverlight SDK and Expression Suite.
So far I have not seen any side effects even after installing all those tools on my dev machine after few months.
You can use Silerlight Spy to view the 'reflected' source code of any Silverlight application on the web. But, you can also use it to validate the structure of the components in your running application. The debugging experience reminds me of working with Firebug while trying to decipher the viusal structure of a web page.
In addition to the visual studio stuff, you should probably get blend and all of it's service packs.
It seems that Microsoft wants Silverlight to take off, yet I cannot find an easy way to develop in it without buying Visual Studio 2008. Has anyone out there found a way to get the silverlight development environment in the express editions of Visual Studio? Any other tools?
Here is a link for ya: HOWTO: Silverlight and Visual Studio Express,
I haven't tried it myself though.
They just released Eclipse tools for Silverlight (eclipse4SL) and I remembered this thread!
Apparently express support will come with the final release
Depending on what you consider "productive", you could work with XAMLPad for a lot of the basic declarative stuff.
The Moonlight project is working on an IDE called Lunar Eclipse, that I think they're eventually going to be integrating into MonoDevelop. Wikipedia says it's in the SVN repository already, but I don't know if there's any code for that which can actually be run effectively yet. I'd think if it's out there it'd be unusably basic if it even compiles... still, something to look into!
I only use Visual Studio as a text editor for xaml and C#. I don't use the designer in Visual Studio at all. You can put together most of your UI with Blend, open your C# files individually with Express. You don't have much intelisense in Visual Studio for the xaml anyway.
As #Brian stated, you can just use Expression blend and create any WPF/Silverlight apps. Especially if you have some Flash background/more interested in the interaction design (UX) I would recommend you to buy expression blend than VS2008.
You can write C# code in notepad and Blend will take care of the compilation.