Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Silverlight 3 download and blog post guide

analysis
Jul 13, 20092 mins

Microsoft released several different components of Silverlight 3. Here's a guide for the downloader

It’s easy to become confused when looking at the many possible downloads and blog posts associated with Friday’s release of Silverlight 3. Here’s a quick guide. I have assumed that you have Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installed, and uninstalled any betas or prereleases of Expression 3.

[ Also on InfoWorld: “Update: Microsoft Silverlight 3 unveiled” | Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld’s Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer. ]

  1. Go to Microsoft’s site to download the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight; this will also install the SL3 developer runtime and SDK
  2. Download the Silverlight Toolkit — Adds more controls
  3. You can download Expression Blend 3 and the SketchFlow RC. Make sure that you don’t accidentally download an old Expression Blend 3 preview (as I did on my first try); it won’t work right with the released Silverlight 3 runtime classes. It’s good for 60 days; in 30 days, the final version should be available, and it will be included in most MSDN subscriptions
  4. Scott Guthrie’s blog post about the Silverlight 3 release gives a good overview of the improvements over Silverlight 2
  5. Somasegar’s blog post about the Silverlight 3 release has more examples than Scott’s
  6. Christian Schormann’s blog post is about Expression Blend 3 and especially the new SketchFlow feature
  7. Brad Abrams’ three-part Silverlight 3 business apps example
  8. Silverlight.net — Tutorials, downloads and forums where you can get help
  9. Microsoft Expression community home
  10. The official site of Silverlight — Includes some V3 feature demos
Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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