Nov 25 2007

Getting started with Silverlight

Category: Programming, tools — Maciek Talaska @ 1:59 pm
Recently I have heard about INETA’s “Silverlight European Challenge” and I have thought that it is a great opportunity to learn this cool new technology from Microsoft. My first steps were to go to Silverlight’s site (community -> gallery) – just to install the runtime and watch some samples. Some of them were really amazing, so I was very excited, and started to install everything I thought I would need as a developer. I have installed:
After a couple of minutes, when everything I have listed above was installed I created first Silverlight project in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. It compiled at once with no errors or warnings. But when I wanted to run the application (you know, the simpliest “Hello world from Silverlight” thing) it didn’t work. I saw the “Get Microsoft Silverlight” instead of what I expected. I went back to the silverlight.net site, just to check if problem was with the application, or something was broken in my developer’s environment. Samples I was watching a few minutes earlier just stopped working. I decided not to spoil my working environment and to test Silverlight’s installation on virtual machine. I used images with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. At the very beginning I realized that I did not need to install Silverlight 1.0 SDK. The next thing I have discovered was that samples stopped working after installing VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight. Unfortunately it is impossible (at least very hard) to develop anything using Silverlight without those VS tools (VS Beta2 is not able to cope with Silverlight’s project type without this add-in). The last thing I tried was to install only Silverlight 1.1, and VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 1.1. and… it worked!

It is really dissapointing that there is no information concerning what you should install to get everything work as it should. There is a topic on a forum on a Silverlight community site, but it describes installation issues with older version (July 2007) of Silverlight 1.1 Alpha package.

So… just to sum everything up, to have environment for Silverlight development configured properly all you need to do is install:

  • Silverlight 1.1
  • VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight

and that’s it! Nothing more! (you may also install SDK for Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 – it should not spoil your environment).

Hope it helps… happy Silverlight-contest coding ;)

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