.NET Answers

I was talking with a friend of mine a couple of days ago about the future of web development and XAML specifically when he made the comment about the tools not being available for the average developer.

I said that I was pretty sure the tools were available now for Visual Studio. This morning, I went looking and sure enough the tools are available so I thought I’d download them and install them.  And while I’m at it, I’ll write about the experience.

So, the first thing you’ll want to do is to make sure you have Service Pack 1 installed.  You can go here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FBEE1648-7106-44A7-9649-6D9F6D58056E&displaylang=en

Note: This install takes quite a while (An hour or so) so plan for it.

Even if you aren’t going to install the Silverlight tools, you’ll want to install SP1 if you haven’t already.

Once you have that installed, you’ll need to download and install the tools from this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=c22d6a7b-546f-4407-8ef6-d60c8ee221ed&displaylang=en

This also takes a fair amount of time.

At no point was I asked to reboot.  But, I was required to make sure some applications were closed before the install processes would continue.

Once everything is installed, launch Visual Studio 2008.  Under File > New Project, you should see a new tree element for Silverlight where you can create either a Silverlight application or a Silverlight library.