What tools do I need to do Silverlight development?

Question

I already own Visual Studio 2008 Team Version, and have an MSDN subscription...and I am an experienced ASP.Net developer.

What do I need to install to do Silverlight development, and can all of those tools be installed alongside my current "production" development machine (want to make sure there will not be any side effects).

I know I want to learn silverlight, but its not clear to me which tools are required and/or recommended in order to get started...

Thanks.

Answer 1

Download the Silverlight 2.0 SDK and Visual Studio 2008 Tools

Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2 Software Development Kit

Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Check here for the links

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4E03409A-77F3-413F-B108-1243C243C4FE&displaylang=en

Another great resource is the original:

http://www.asp.net/downloads/ AND http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

Hope this helps: Andrew :-)

Answer 2

Silverlight.net is a good place to start. All the tools are finalized so you should be able to install all things silverlight and be fine.

Answer 3

This link has pretty much every thing you need.

If you're already comfortable with VS development, you can just develop Silverlight in VS by downloading the Microsoft Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008.

If you're more of a designer than devloper, then Microsoft Expression Studio may be better for you.

Answer 4

Follow the steps here:-

http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

I have no problems using this stuff side-by-side with my regular development

Answer 5

I am also trying to get started with Silverlight development. Here is how I was getting started.

1.) To set up development environment: Getting started with Silverlight

2.) Web Sites to keep up with.

• MSDN Silverlight Development Center
• Shawn Wildermuth: He has turn from an ADO guy to a Silverlight guru/trainer.
• Scott Gu's Silverlight tagged stories

I have Visual Studio 2003/5/8(+Resharper 4.1) installed on my machine along side siliverlight SDK and Expression Suite.

So far I have not seen any side effects even after installing all those tools on my dev machine after few months.

Answer 6

You can use Silerlight Spy to view the 'reflected' source code of any Silverlight application on the web. But, you can also use it to validate the structure of the components in your running application. The debugging experience reminds me of working with Firebug while trying to decipher the viusal structure of a web page.

Answer 7

In addition to the visual studio stuff, you should probably get blend and all of it's service packs.