MIX is happening and there is a lot of excitement around the various releases such as the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview, IE9 Platform Preview and few other announcements that have been made. Clearly, the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview has generated the maximum interest and opened a plethora of opportunities for .NET Developers. It also takes the mobile development to a new generation and doesn’t force developers to learn different programming language. Along with this, few other releases have been out. The most anticipated Silverlight 4 RC is out and its corresponding templates are also out there for you to download. Once VS 2010 RC was released, it was much of a disappointment that it doesn’t support SL4 development as well as the SL4 Business Application Development (a.k.a. WCF RIA Services). There were few workarounds though nothing concrete. Earlier I had written about how the WCF RIA Services Preview does work with ASP.NET Development using VS 2010 RC. However, with the release of SL4 RC and the corresponding tooling updates, one can develop for both SL4 as well as SL4 + WCF RIA Services using VS 2010 RC. This is kind of important and keeps the continuum going until VS 2010 RTMs. So, the purpose of this post is to quickly give the updates and links to install the relevant tools. Silverlight 4 RC Runtime Windows Runtime or the Mac Runtime Silverlight 4 RC Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2010 RC Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (this would install the Runtime as well automatically) Expression Blend 4 Beta Expression Blend 4 Beta If you install the SL4 RC Developer Tools, it also installs the WCF RIA Services Preview automatically. You just need to install the WCF RIA Services Toolkit that can be downloaded from Install the WCF RIA Services Toolkit Of course you can also just install the WCF RIA Services for VS 2010 RC separately (without SL4 Tools) from here Kindly note, all the above mentioned links are with respect to Visual Studio 2010 RC edition. If you are developing with VS 2008, then you can just target SL3 (as I write this, there seems to be no official support for developing SL4 with VS 2008) and the related tools can be downloaded from http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/ Basically you need to download SL 3 Runtime, SDK, Expression Blend 3 and the Silverlight Toolkit. All the links for the download are available in the above mentioned page. Also, a version of WCF RIA Services that is supported in VS 2008 is available for download at WCF RIA Services Beta for VS 2008 I know there are far too many things to keep in mind. So, I put a flowchart that could help with depicting it pictorial. Note that this is just my own imagination and doesn’t cover all scenarios. for example, if you are neither developing for Webform, Silverlight, you end up nowhere whereas in actual scenario you may want to develop Desktop, Services, Console, Game and what not. So, keep in mind this is just Web. Cheers !!!
