Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Silverlight: How to Set Up for Development

analysis
Aug 9, 20071 min

After downloading all the new Microsoft tools I told you about on August 1st, I was a bit confused about how best to set up for Silverlight development. It was clear to me that Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, the Silverlight Alpha add-ins for Visual Studio 2008, and the Expression Blend v2 August Preview were the right tools for developing Silverlight 1.1 applications with the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha refresh SDK. But w

But what about Silverlight 1.0? Do the two SDKs install side by side? What are the best tools for Silverlight 1.0 development? So I asked Microsoft, through the PR person assigned to the Silverlight account.

The advice I got back was simple: use the Silverlight 1.1 development tools to target either 1.1 or 1.0. The two SDKs do not install side by side, although you can certainly install them on separate machines or in separate Virtual PCs on the same machine. However, Silverlight 1.0 is a proper subset of Silverlight 1.1, and the tools let you target either one.

There is one small disadvantage of doing this: the Silverlight 1.0 RC client updates itself automatically, but the Silverlight 1.1 client does not. Technical Evangelist Tim Sneath explains:

If you’re running the 1.1 builds (as I’m sure most developers are), we don’t auto-update your machine. Since you’re on the “development” fork, we require you to manually update your machine (simply run the install from the link here and your machine will get the latest bits). The current 1.1 bits are v1.1.20806.0 (the build number matches, just the major and minor version numbers are different).

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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