What tools do I need to do Silverlight development? - silverlight

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.

Related

Silverlight Framework - (End User)

I have never used Silverlight before but have been provided a copy of the package, (see link below).
https://github.com/ivconsult/eNeg
Please could I request guidance on how I would compile this and can this be run from desktop or would it need to be uploaded to a server.
Forgive, my poor understanding of how this works any help appreciated . . .
Your question is a bit rough. You can run any silverlight application locally on your development PC. In order to open and compile the project you have to install:
A .NET Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as Visual Studio or the free Visual Web Developer Express
Install Microsoft Silverlight runtime for windows. (This is the runtime that’s required for Silverlight applications).
Install Silverlight Toolkit
Install Silverlight SDK
Install Silverlight Tools for VS 2010 (Optional)
Install Expression Blend. This is a design tool that allows users to
interact with Silverlight.
After this, open the solution file "citPOINT.eNeg.sln".

Silverlight IDE for latest version (May 2010)

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.

Is developing Silverlight free, and will it stay that way?

As far as I can tell developing for Silverlight is free as long as you already have Visual Studio 2008. Does anyone know if MS has any plans to change that?
If anything, they will try to make it easier and cheaper. One recent program is called WebSiteSpark... which gives away all of the Microsoft Web Dev tools. This is because of increased competition between Microsoft and competing technologies such as those provided by Adobe.
You can develop Silverlight applications using Visual Web Developer Express, which is free.
And I don't think Microsoft has plans changing that, because that would mean they get a lot less new Silverlight developers, and it would take longer for Silverlight to catch up to Flash.
Silverlight framework itself is a free download from Microsoft. What exactly do you mean, when you say "developing for Silverlight is free"?
And if Visual Studio isn't your cup of tea, there's always Eclipse Tools for Silverlight which is also free.

Silverlight 3 - Visual Studio Tools

I am trying to get started doing some Silverlight development. I am interested in learning about the out-of-browser support. I can create and run Silverlight 3 applications just fine. I have confirmed that I have Silverlight 3 instead of Silverlight 3 Beta. I have been able to confirm this because my API list includes Application.InstallStateChanged instead of Application.ExecutionStateChanged.
However, I do not have the option to enable my application to run offline in Visual Studio. I can see this option in this blog post (http://johnpapa.net/silverlight/updated-silvertwit-code-for-msdn-magazine/). Unfortunately, I do not have the option shown or the Reduce XAP size option. I have downloaded the Visual Studio tools from here (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9442b0f2-7465-417a-88f3-5e7b5409e9dd&displaylang=en).
What am I doing wrong?
Thank you!
It looks like John Papa is using a new version of visual studio possibly the VS2010 beta.
Try this tutorial instead
http://wildermuth.com/2009/03/18/Enabling_Out-of-Browser_Support_in_Silverlight_3
or
http://blogs.msdn.com/katriend/archive/2009/07/10/silverlight-3-out-of-browser-applications.aspx
Corrupted Install
It looks like a corrupted install. Try uninstalling and then see Allen Chen's advice here:
http://silverlight.net/forums/t/83226.aspx including:
Silverlight3_Tools.exe /x:c:\temp /u to manually extract the SL 3 files and c:\temp\SPInstaller.exe to verify the tools install.
Use Blend
Also, If you have Blend 3 installed (preview here) you can enable Out of the Browser inside of Blend. See Project->Silverlight Project Options.
One thing might be that your Silverlight developer runtime got corrupted/overwritten. Try installing it once and see if it solves...
http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx

Is there a way to productively do Silverlight development without buying VS2008?

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.

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