Tim Heuer

| Comments

Today’s the day!  Tuesday at DevConnections in Las Vegas, Scott Guthrie just announced the ‘launch’ of Silverlight 4.  We wanted to take the opportunity at DevConnections to let a large audience of our customers online/offline know that we’re done and shipped Silverlight 4.  As of today it’s now available for you to download/use.  Here’s some helpful quick update information for you:

What’s New in Silverlight 4?

Rather than cut/paste what I’ve already said here, I recommend the following reading:

These two posts are full of detailed information with links to tutorials and videos to help you get started.  Since the RC (which was released middle March), not much has changed from an API perspective so you should be good to go getting started using the above information.  One thing that has changed in the tools is that for XAP signing, there is a UI support for enabling the tool to help you select a certificate, etc.  You can still use my post-build method though.

Downloading Silverlight 4

The availability of Silverlight 4 will be approximately 10:00 AM PST on Thursday 15 April 2010.  I suggest you prep now by getting the Visual Studio 2010 release that was launched/available yesterday.

The goods:

That’s my own personal minimum list.  VS and SL4 tools are the minimum required to get started doing development.

Wait, what’s this RC stuff?

To be clear, Silverlight 4 has released.  This is RTW (release to web).  It is the version 4 of Silverlight.  Shipped.  Done.  Finished.

The tools (namely SL4 tools, RIA Services and Blend) are in their ‘release candidate’ mode.  I’ll spare you the gory details, but remember that these tools teams need SL4 to be *done* before they can be done.  SL4 is a dependency for them.  These tools are release quality though and I’d recommend using them.  Their final versions will come soon enough and will be a minor update.

What about RIA Services?!  You don’t consider that to be valuable?!

Actually I do.  But if you’ve installed the Silverlight 4 Tools, then you already have it!

This seems to be some confusion to many and perhaps because of how we present the information in an effort to be complete.  If you are a developer, install Silverlight 4 Tools.  After this installation completes you will have:

  • Silverlight 4 developer runtime
  • Silverlight 4 SDK
  • Visual Studio patch, debug tools and project templates
  • WCF RIA Services RC

installed.  No need to run the SDK or RIA Services installers separately.  Adding the Silverlight Toolkit to this provides you with more controls to leverage in your applications as well (charting, ContextMenu, etc.).

Hey, what about the Windows Phone 7 developer tools?

If you need to continue doing Windows Phone 7 development, stick with the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate for now!  The updated CTP of the Windows Phone developer tools is not quite done yet.  Information about updated tools availability will be forthcoming on these tools.  Stay tuned.

Can I keep VS2008 and VS2010 on the same machine?

Yes you can.  Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 can co-exist on the same machine.  Obviously there are some differences to what the tools can do with regard to Silverlight.  There are two distinct differences I like to call out:

  • VS2008 cannot be used for Silverlight 4 development.
  • You can only have one version of WCF RIA Services installed on the machine.

For the latter, you may be asking “huh?”  There is a version of RIA Services for VS2008.  There is also a version for VS2010.  Unfortunately RIA Services cannot co-exist in two versions.  You have to pick one.  And the VS2008 one is only for SL3 and only supported until December this year.  I recommend moving on from that…it’s not going to be developed any more…essentially the PDC09 version was the last revision there.

Other resources

If you need other resources, be sure to check the Silverlight Community Site for details on things like the stand-alone documentation file, Mac platform developer build (for debugging if needed) and other resources.  Be sure to check out the Silverlight 4 videos if you haven’t yet as well!  I’ve gotten a few questions so I’ll emit some resources here:

Hope this helps find things easier.

What about the future versions…

Man, give us a break!!!  But seriously make your opinion known on http://silverlight.mswish.net for features.  Be specifically broad ;-).  What I mean is “Fix Printing” doesn’t help, but “Enable automatic paging in printing” is better.

Hope this helps!


Please enjoy some of these other recent posts...

About Tim

Tim is a program manager at Microsoft, working on .NET and developer tools (formerly UI frameworks including WPF, Silverlight, UWP, and WinUI). In the past Tim worked as software developer for various healthcare and consulting companies building client and web applications. Personally Tim is an avid cyclist.

Sponsored By

Comments