Is there a way to productively do Silverlight development without buying VS2008?

Question

It seems that Microsoft wants Silverlight to take off, yet I cannot find an easy way to develop in it without buying Visual Studio 2008. Has anyone out there found a way to get the silverlight development environment in the express editions of Visual Studio? Any other tools?

Answer 1

Apparently express support will come with the final release

Answer 2

Depending on what you consider "productive", you could work with XAMLPad for a lot of the basic declarative stuff.
The Moonlight project is working on an IDE called Lunar Eclipse, that I think they're eventually going to be integrating into MonoDevelop. Wikipedia says it's in the SVN repository already, but I don't know if there's any code for that which can actually be run effectively yet. I'd think if it's out there it'd be unusably basic if it even compiles... still, something to look into!

Answer 3

Here is a link for ya: HOWTO: Silverlight and Visual Studio Express,
I haven't tried it myself though.

Answer 4

I only use Visual Studio as a text editor for xaml and C#. I don't use the designer in Visual Studio at all. You can put together most of your UI with Blend, open your C# files individually with Express. You don't have much intelisense in Visual Studio for the xaml anyway.

Answer 5

As @Brian stated, you can just use Expression blend and create any WPF/Silverlight apps. Especially if you have some Flash background/more interested in the interaction design (UX) I would recommend you to buy expression blend than VS2008. You can write C# code in notepad and Blend will take care of the compilation.

Answer 6

Hey, They just released Eclipse tools for Silverlight (eclipse4SL) and I remembered this thread!