Informikon

At the moment (i.e. end of March 08), MS doesn't provide a way to develop and test Silverlight applications with the free edition of Visual Studio (Visual Studio Express). I have posted a few downloads that help with this situation.

In this entry, I would like to provide instructions on how you can go around the limitations of the current version of VS (Visual Studio Express 2008), in order to test and develop Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 applications.

I like the "Image Snipper" sample on the following web page:
http://silverlight.net/community/gallerydetail.aspx?cat=5

If you choose to download the sample and try to open the project in VSE, you'll get an error message like "The project type is not supported by this installation" (or something similar). In order to be able to open the project in VSE, you can do the following:

Open the .csproj file in notepad and remove the elements <ProductVersion.../> and <ProjectTypeGuids... /> in the first <PropertyGroup> section and save it. Now, if you try to open the project in VSE, it should open correctly. But if you try to build it (i.e. F6), you'll get some errors. That's because VSE doesn't know about Silverlight.

You can download the archive from my previous entry and copy the four files with names starting with Microsoft.* into the directory C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight\v2.0 on your machine. I have extracted these files from the download for Visual Studio. Now VSE knows how to build Silverlight applications. So if you try to build the project again, it should build successfully.

You can go to the subdir ClientBin and double-click the testpage.html file. A page in your browser should open and load the "Image Snipper" sample.

In order to create your own Silverlight template project, you can delete most of the files in this project and use "Export Template..." from the File menu. After completing this step, you'll have a basic template to create Silverlight applications in the Express Edition. I have included such a template in my previous download, mentioned above.

I suppose you can do the same for VB, if you start with a Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 application for which you have a .vbproj file.

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Now that the Beta 1 of Silverlight has been released, I thought it is time to update the stuff that I used to develop and test these apps with Visual Studio 2008 Express (VSE). Some MS employee mentioned that the Express version of VS will support Silverlight in the future but at the moment the only approved way to develop Silverlight apps is with the standards edition of Visual Studio (or with Expression Blend).

I have posted a couple of archives that included stuff that simplifies the development of Silverlight apps with the VSE. As far as I can tell, most of these still work with the Beta 1 release. The template projects has to be upgraded. In this note, I will describe the changes that are needed for a basic template project for a Silverlight application written in C#.

If you prefer, you can just download the following, which contained the project template for Silverlight app with Visual C# 2008 Express.

The project file now generates a .xap archives, so the following now appears in the <PropertyGroup> element of the project:

<XapOutputs>true</XapOutputs>
<XapFilename>SilverlightExpress2B1.xap</XapFilename>

Because we deploy with a .xap archive, we need to add extra info for the Silverlight runtime:

<SilverlightApplication>true</SilverlightApplication>
<SilverlightAppEntry>SilverlightExpress2B1.App</SilverlightAppEntry>
<SilverlightManifestTemplate>Properties\AppManifest.xml</SilverlightManifestTemplate>
<GenerateSilverlightManifest>true</GenerateSilverlightManifest>

And we can have a test page generated, so we can click the .html file in the ClientBin directory in order to check our application:

<TestPageFileName>TestPage.html</TestPageFileName>
<CreateTestPage>true</CreateTestPage>

The reference assemblies name have changed from the previous release, so the newer elements looks as follow:

    <Reference Include="System.Windows" />
    <Reference Include="mscorlib" />
    <Reference Include="system" />
    <Reference Include="System.Core" />
    <Reference Include="System.Xml" />
    <Reference Include="System.Windows.Browser" />

I have included the necessary files in the link above.

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