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Silverlight Tips of the Day - Blog by Mike Snow

Game Programming with Silverlight

Silverlight Tip of the Day #54: How to Develop with Silverlight Tools for Free

The recent RC0 release of Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio is now compatible with Visual Web Developer Express with SP1 installed! Express is FREE and can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/.

This version only supports the English version of Visual Studio. Non-English users will have to use this version until the language specific releases are completed.

  Thank you,
--Mike Snow

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Posted: Oct 01 2008, 10:57 AM by mike.snow | with 15 comment(s)
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Comments

jkyoutsey said:

Free is a technical term. So far, I've found that you really NEED Blend to do any real Silverlight development. Some of us don't have a design staff and a development staff. Some of us don't have staff. So, Blend still isn't free, but seems to be an essential part of doing Silverlight dev.
# October 1, 2008 3:10 PM

atllocal74 said:

jkyoutsey, I disagree with your comment that you NEED blend to do real Silverlight development.  My company has no designers and we have been developing a complex inventory application for 4 months and never touched Blend.  

In fact I find it completely the opposite.  Blend will create static Xaml for you, but if you are doing real business applications most things will be dynamic based on data and logic and cannot be hardcoded in the UI.  For instance if you want to create animations on the fly based on events and logic against objects that are loaded from the database, you need to understand how to code that because it doesn't exist at design time.  Anything you can do in blend you can code yourself.  It's similar to how in VS, you can drag and drop a DB connection onto your webform and it creates the code for you.  It's nice to see how the code should look, but that's hard coded and not going to fly in an enterprise app.  

It is a great tool that can help with creating icredible looking apps, but you definitely don't have to have it.

# October 1, 2008 5:50 PM

mike.snow said:

I am the same way. I have created a number of games completly in Visual Studio without Blend. I think of Blend more for designers and VS more for developmers. Since I use bitmaps rather than Vector graphics I have less of a need for Blend than other people may. Don't get me wrong, Blend is awesome and very useful but it really depends on what you are trying to create.

# October 1, 2008 5:59 PM

caperaven said:

you can go a very long way with out having to use blend. Visual studio allows you to code in xaml and it works pretty well for beta software.

If you are only concerned with line of business applications like I am, you don't NEED blend.

Blend is a nice to have.

If you want to make eye popping UI then you do NEED a design tool, the best of is blend.

You can also get some design work done with inkskape and export to xaml, wrap that xaml up in a user control for easy use and reuse.  

So if you are going to be serious about creating a real rich UI, yes you need to use blend.

If you only want to concentrate on the line of business with a nice but simple UI, you can use inkscape and vs.

# October 1, 2008 6:03 PM

Qbus said:

This rise a good question.

Jesse, will we get an "express" version of Blend as we have with all the other tools?

If you haven't thought about this, then maybe you should :)

//Qbus

# October 1, 2008 6:04 PM

2008 October 02 - Links for today « My (almost) Daily Links said:

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# October 2, 2008 3:59 AM

Dew Drop - October 2, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew said:

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# October 2, 2008 8:48 AM

mike.snow said:

QBus - I am not Jesse :)

# October 2, 2008 2:14 PM

Qbus said:

Hehe, I got confused! Sorry :) Your blogs looks the same :P

Maybe I should ask the question to Jesse :D

# October 2, 2008 2:22 PM

Community Blogs said:

In this issue: Jeff Paries, Tim Heuer, Shawn Wildermuth, Mike Snow, Jesse Liberty, Terence Tsang, Bill

# October 3, 2008 12:39 AM

cyberhuey said:

I have been on the Silverlight bandwagon pretty much since the WPF/E days. I am primarily a developer but find expressions an essencial tool for nothing else than for the vsm. I think it is finally fixed but I know my studio usually didn't like any of the vsm stuff. Right now you can get the previews to hold you over until you can lay out the cash for it. I am lucky, I have MSDN account where I get blend and web design - yay my boss!!

# October 8, 2008 4:02 PM

mike.snow said:

Ah, sorry forgot to answer. There are no plans I am aware of that invovle an express version of Blend. They do have the trial.

# October 8, 2008 7:12 PM

Visual Web Developer Team Blog said:

Silverlight Tip of the Day #57 Title: How to Dynamically Load a Silverlight Control within another Silverlight

# October 8, 2008 11:05 PM

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# October 27, 2008 3:26 PM

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# October 27, 2008 3:31 PM