VS2008 SP1 silverlight design surface will not allow me to drop components onto it

Question

I have VS2008 with .NET 3.5 SP1 (vs has SP1 too of course). I have loaded the latest silverlight tools.. and it went through and un-installed any beta stuff..

No errors installing, and everything else in SP1 seems ok. In fact silverlight itself (i.e. when you select the silverlight project).

Just when I try to drop a silverlight component onto the design surface, I get the crosshair symbol, but it will not let me essentially "draw" the component.

The strange thing is if I use Expression Blend, then I can of course drop components onto the design surface in Blend and then code behind in VS2008...

Just wondering if anyone else has come across this... of course I realise I could un-install the whole lot of VS2008... but it takes ages to install again if this is something quick and easy to resolve??

Many thanks in advance.

David

Answer 1

The visual studio 2008 silverlight desing surface is a read only view. You will need expression blend to do that.

Answer 2

You can drag controls from the toolbox into XAML view, but the designer view is display only in Visual Studio 2008.

If you want a designer you need to try Expression Blend. You can download a 60 day trial of Blend here - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5FF08106-B9F4-43CD-ABAD-4CC9D9C208D7&displaylang=en

Visual Studio 2010 is supposed to include a designer for Silverlight that should be similar to the WPF designer in 2008.