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?
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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.
jle
2009-11-08 16:01:25
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Silverlight framework itself is a free download from Microsoft. What exactly do you mean, when you say "developing for Silverlight is free"?
KMan
2009-11-08 16:03:03
Meaning, will I have to buy anything down the road to continue to use it. For example. WPF can be used in VS2008 but to really make good use of it, you need to but Expression Blend.
JimDel
2009-11-08 16:06:09
Since we are talking about Microsoft, nothing comes for free. Not even the 'redistributable' frameworks; because eventually we pay for it some way or the other(in form of IDE, compilers, etc) while we develop solutions using Silverlight.
KMan
2009-11-10 08:51:34
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A:
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.
Reshure
2009-11-08 16:07:28
You're right, Reshure! Developing Silverlight applications costs the same as creating HTML applications. Some of the tools the developer choose to use may costs money, but developing applications is totally costless.Besides that I actually think that VWD Express is a very cool tool and is amazed that MS ship it for free.
xamlgeek
2009-11-08 21:31:33
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A:
And if Visual Studio isn't your cup of tea, there's always Eclipse Tools for Silverlight which is also free.
Jim Lynn
2009-11-09 17:28:51