Tools for Silverlight and .NET parallel programming?

Question

An upcoming project at work looks like it might involve Silverlight. We're a .NET shop without all that much Silverlight-experience, but it looks like we need to ramp up our knowledge for this.

So I'm wondering, what tools should we get?

We are using Visual studio 2008, and will most likely not be able to jump to .NET 4.0, although we might be able to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010, provided that won't give us any problems developing for Silverlight 3 and .NET 3.5.

But what else? As far as I can tell, there's no visual designer in VS2008 for Silverlight, but I noticed the .xaml file had a reference to an Expression Blend namespace in it. Should we be using that tool? Or would that just be overkill, or perhaps mostly geared towards designers only?

Since we will be sharing some of the code base beneath our business logic, so that business logic classes only have to be written, tested, and bugfixed, once, we'll be using continuous integration, TeamCity to be specific, to make sure we don't write code that doesn't compile in Silverlight, or vice versa, but are there other tools that would help us in that regard?

Any hot tips you can give would be appreciated.

Answer 1

While VS2008 doesn't have a visual designer, VS2010 does.

Expression Blend is effectively the visual designer for VS2008. It is geared towards designers, but developers should be able to use it too - you can launch and debug your application from Blend in exactly the same way as Visual Studio, but it doesn't have the IntelliSense options for code editing. It does however, have Intellisense for XAML editing.

You won't have access to the parallel programming features unless you move to .NET 4.0. It's release date is March/April 2010 (I think the date has been pushed back from that quoted in this article, but only by a week or two), which isn't very far off now. When are you expecting to release your product.

You can control which version of the Silverlight and .NET Framework you want to target in VS2010 (as you can in VS2008) so you shouldn't have any problems there.