Silverlight 4 Tools, WCF RIA Services and Themes Released

This morning we published the final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio and WCF RIA Services.  In April, when Silverlight 4 was released, the tools were still in “RC” status.  Today, they are no longer and are officially released.  There is no new update to Silverlight itself, but these tools are the final bits of this version.

Get the Tools

If you have a clean machine you can get everything you need using the Web Platform Installer by clicking on the link at the Silverlight community site.  This will install Silverlight Tools, Silverlight, WCF RIA Services, Silverlight Toolkit and the RIA Services Toolkit in one step for you.

NOTE: If you have a previous version of the RIA Services Toolkit installed you MUST uninstall that prior to installing any new version.

Optionally you can grab the direct Silverlight 4 Tools installer here.  This will install the tools and WCF RIA Services for you and can be installed on top of any existing RC installation as it will uninstall previous tools and WCF RIA Services for you.

Watch some info about the tools and RIA Services release:

• Silverlight TV: Silverlight Tools Released
• Silverlight TV: WCF RIA Services 1.0!

New Themes Released

Today we also are making available the final version of the 3 new application themes we developed.  These include the Accent Color, Windows 7 and Cosmopolitan themes.  The download contains Visual Studio 2010 template installers, Blend 4 compatible templates as well as the raw resource dictionary assets and sample projects.  Final versions for the RIA Services business application template will be coming as we identified some last minute changes we need to make.  You can, of course, use the raw assets and tweak them into your existing applications as needed.

NOTE: A word on ‘Cosmopolitan’ name change.  Many have asked if Metro is being renamed.  The term ‘Cosmopolitan’ refers only to the name given to this application template and is arbitrary.  Metro is the code name for the design language found in Windows Phone 7 and other applications.  It is not a literal theme name or anything else and is a term referred to internally.  This template simply was renamed to Cosmopolitan.

You can download the themes here: Silverlight 4 Application Themes.  There is a README_FIRST file explaining the different files. 

Thanks for your patience as we finalized the release of the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio and these accompanying templates.