I’ve been messing around looking at what is involved with developing for Silverlight 1.1. My impression of the documentation available for the 1.1 version so far is that its pretty bad- but again, let me point out that I think its great that they shipped it even at this early stage. I’d much rather have the bits available with confusing docs than not at all.

One thing that took me a bit to figure out is that there are better docs on silverlight.net than there are in the Silverlight developer center on MSDN. The MSDN pages just have access to the downloads and some really high level overviews. The silverlight.net site at least has the quickstarts available in online form with easy reference to the source code. Playing with this a bit got me past the basics of getting one of the demos compiling myself and running.

The second issue is the version of Visual Studio needed. You need to run Orcas beta 1 to get the SDK templates to install and for debugging support. Visual Studio 2005 can work fine to build projects as long as you can do a few things yourself and don’t need the debugger. I think Orcas is supposed to be able to install side-by-side with Visual Studio 2005 but I don’t totally trust that. Luckly Microsoft is offering Orcas as a Virtual PC image which should be a great way to go.

If you want to build stuff yourself with Visual Studio 2005 just create a new DLL project. Delete the default control it makes for you and remove all the references. Select Add References and go to your \Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight and add all the managed DLLs you see there to your project. You probably don’t need them all but I didn’t want to mess around.

You can then create your project as a set of .CS, .XAML, .HTM and .JS files. Don’t forget to set the “Copy to output directory” property on your .XAML .HTM and .JS files so they appear in the target directory. In your XAML you can refer to your DLL like this-

    x:Class="Samples.Silverlight.CS.ScriptingCanvas;assembly=TestSilver1.dll"

Finally set the project to debug opening in the browser with the URL to your .HTM file. IE will give you a security warning everytime but once you bypass that you should be running.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Silverlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.