Here is a quick walk through of setting up your Silverlight 4 development environment. The first assumed step is that you have Visual Studio 2010 already installed and any appropriate patches. Then download the following in order and install each.
- Silverlight 4 Tools RC2 for Visual Studio and Silverlight 4 RTW
- Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate
- Silverlight Toolkit – Not necessary, but lots of good bits in this download.
- WCF RIA Services – This is also not necessary, but you should grab it just in case anyway.
Once each of these are installed jump into Visual Studio 2010. Start a new Silverlight 4 Project by going to File -> New -> Project -> and select the Silverlight Project Templates. Here you’ll see a new list of projects that are specific to the above listed downloads.
- Silverlight Business Application
- WCF RIA Service Class Library
- Silverlight Unit Test Application
One way to confirm (and what I am going to display here in this entry) Silverlight 4 is installed ok is to select the Silverlight Application Template and start a new project.
On the next screen you will see some of the standard options. I always go with the ASP.NET MVC Option and with these new installations I am going to select Silverlight 4 (should be selected already) from the drop down and check the Enable WCF RIA Services check box.
I also, for good measure, always create a unit test project for the ASP.NET MVC Project that will host the Silverlight Application Project. When all is setup, the Solutions Explorer should look like what is shown below.
Add the following code to the XAML of the MainPage.xaml of the Silverlight Project.
[sourcecode language="html"]
<UserControl x:Class="Silverlight4.MainPage"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
mc:Ignorable="d"
d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
<TextBlock x:Name="textBlockTest" Text="Hello World!" />
</Grid>
</UserControl>
[/sourcecode]
Now execute the project, if all runs well you have installed Silverlight 4 successfully.
Bam! Silverlight 4 ready to go! I will have more on Silverlight 4 very soon, as I will be starting a project (personal) and blogging it as I work through it. Also, if you run into any issues I would like to read about them, so please comment. I had a few issues and also had some design time rendering issues in the VS 2010 IDE when I installed these bits at first.
