Installing Silverlight 4 Toolkit without Visual studio 2010 (for build server)

Question

I have just been informed that the Silverlight 4 Toolkit (latest download) requires the prior installation of VS 2010.

We are setting up an automated build server for a very large Silverlight Prism project and would prefer not to do a full install of VS 2010 on an unmanned build machine.

• Is VS 2010 actually required for an install of the Silverlight 4 Toolkit?
• Why is it required?
• Is it possible to work around this (copy specific pieces from another Dev machine?)

Thanks in advance for any information.

Answer 1

Don't install the Toolkit at all. In these large controlled scenarios you would probably want to copy the toolkit dlls to folder owned by your change control system anyway.

Ultimately the toolkit is just a set of dlls. On install it does other things to make using it as a developer convenient in VS and Blend but it has no special requirements at build time.

Answer 2

The problem with this is that it doesn't install the msbuild tasks. I have found that it is possible to install just the SDK by extracting it from the tools download. For details see here: http://neilsleightholm.blogspot.com/2010/09/building-silverlight-4-applications.html.