Why SilverLight 4.0 but not SilverLight 3.0?

Question

Hi,

As far as I understand to develop a SL 4.0 application I will need to upgrade VS 2010 because CoreCLR of SL 4.0 seems to use some parts of .NET 4.0.

Which means extra cost for me regarding to licensing of VS 2010 + Resharper 5.0.

But if I prefer SL 3.0 instead of SL 4.0 I won't need anything to upgrade and I can go on with my VS 2008.

So, Can you compare SL 4.0 against SL 3.0 in terms of tools, performance, debugging etc. so that I can say: "Wow! It seems it is really worthy to go on with SL 4.0!"

Thanks

Answer 1

The free version of VS2010 Web Developer Express allows you to build Silverlight 4/ WCF RIA Services so you can try it out and see for yourself at no extra cost.

http://www.microsoft.com/express/Web/

Answer 2

If Silverlight 3 offers what you need then I don't see why you should upgrade. Really.

With that said, SL4 offers several new features and is supposed to be much faster (click "What are the features of Silverlight 4").

You can still develop SL3 applications in Visual Studio 2010 (I do in fact), so you don't have to upgrade your Silverlight application if that is a problem for some reason.

Answer 3

Having RIA services alone was worth the cost of upgrading. That has saved us days of boiler-plate coding to bridge the great client-server divide.

Add to that all the other new features in SL4 (mentioned in the other answers already) and in VS 2010 as well, I strongly recommend everyone upgrade to the latest versions of both.

(I have no affiliation with Microsoft, other than using their dev products 7 days a week) :)