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I was asked a question on my blog this morning about "if there was going to be tighter integration between Visual Studio 2008 and Silverlight 1.1". I have not personally done a lot with Silverlight from a developer perspective, but I'd hear about (via internal emails) a project to build an add-on for Visual Studio 2008 that will make Silverlight development much easier. Microsoft did a similar thing after the release of Visual Studio 2005 for easier development with the new (at the time) Microsoft AJAX framework and for the newly released (at the time) .NET Framework 3.0 (E.g., Workflow, WCF, CardSpace, WPF).
So, for those of you who did not know about it already, I am adding the download link for the Alpha release of this add-on. Keep checking on the Microsoft download site (www.microsoft.com/downloads) for updates over the next year, until Silverlight 1.1 releases and you are likely to find updates to this add-on that you can download (freely).
Here's the link to the download: Click here to download
Here's the description of what is in the add-on (from the site):
Add-on for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 for developing applications for Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh
Overview
This package is an add-on to the Beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2008 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh. It provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic. The project system includes:
- Visual Basic and C# Project templates
- Intellisense and code generators for XAML
- Debugging of Silverlight applications
- Web reference support
- Integration with Expression Blend
~ Robert Shelton