Installing Silverlight 1.0 Templates on Visual Studio

On August 9th I discussed Microsoft’s recommendations for setting up a Silverlight development environment. As I noted on August 25th, this process hasn’t been without its troubles for me.

With the release of a shipping, supported Silverlight 1.0, I decided to get serious about testing the two Silverlight SDKs. I already had the Silverlight 1.1 alpha SDK set up properly with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 in a Virtual PC. I set up the Silverlight 1.0 SDK with Visual Studio 2005 on my production development environment… and found no Silverlight template when I went to create a project.

This reminded me of an installation bug with an early LINK preview. I checked my C:Documents and SettingsMy DocumentsVisual Studio 2005TemplatesProjectTemplatesVisual C#Silverlight directory, and there was the SilverlightJSApplication archive. I copied that Silverlight directory to C:Documents and SettingsMy DocumentsVisual StudioProjectTemplatesVisual C#, restarted Visual Studio 2005, and was able to create a Silverlight 1.0 JavaScript application.

That wasn’t what Microsoft recommended, however. They suggested developing with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and the Expression Blend 2 preview. There wasn’t a Silverlight 1.0 JavaScript application template installed there, however, and the Silverlight 1.0 SDK installer refused to work in the absence of Visual Studio 2005.

Searching the Silverlight forums eventually got me to this posting by Shawn Wildermuth: Installing Silverlight 1.0 Templates on Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (Orcas). Reading over what Shawn did, I realized that I could skip a few steps since I already had the template extracted. I copied the SilverlightJSApplication archive into the Virtual PC, placed it in a new Silverlight directory under c:Documents and SettingsMy DocumentsVisual Studio 2008TemplatesProjectTemplatesVisual C#, ran “devenv /setup” from a Visual Studio command prompt, and I was in business.