Silverlight 4 Released: Guide

What is in the Silverlight 4 Release

Silverlight 4 contains a ton of new features and capabilities.  In particular  it is focused on three scenarios with this release:

•Further enhancing media support
•Building great business applications
•Enabling out of the browser experiences

Also check out these three great posts by Tim Heuer that talk about the new features and provide a guide to the new Silverlight 4 capabilities:

•Silverlight 4 Beta – A Guide to the New Features

•Silverlight 4 RC – What was updated

•Silverlight 4 Released

Also read David Anson’s great Silverlight 4 Toolkit post to learn more about the new controls and functionality also available within the Silverlight Toolkit release which is now available.  Visit this page to learn more about the new Pivot functionality in Silverlight 4 – which makes it really easy to visualize and interact with collections of images using Silverlight.

Lastly, make sure to visit the www.silverlight.net web-site and visit the “Get Started” section to find free tutorials that you can use.

Download and Install Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010

To develop Silverlight 4 applications you should first download and install Visual Studio 2010 or download and install the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express edition. Download Here!

Then install the Silverlight Tools RC2  for Visual Studio 2010.  This setup includes the Silverlight 4 Developer Runtime, Silverlight 4 SDK, RIA Services, and VS 2010 tools support.  Once installed you can do File->New Project and choose Silverlight Application to create your first Silverlight 4 project.  You can then use the new WYSIWYG Silverlight designer in Visual Studio 2010 to design and build rich Silverlight 4 applications.

Important: If you previously installed the Silverlight 4 Beta or RC build on your machine, please make sure to go into Add/Remove programs and uninstall the “Update for Visual Studio 2010 (KB976272)” package prior to installing the Silverlight Tools RC2 for Visual Studio 2010 setup. 

Note that while Silverlight 4 is released, the “Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010” is currently in “RC2” mode (meaning we are going to keep an eye out for any remaining issues before finally calling it done).

Download and Install Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate

You can also download and install the Expression Blend 4 RC to create and design great Silverlight 4 applications.  Blend contains “Sketchflow” support – which makes it really easy to rapidly prototype ideas and applications.  To learn more about Sketchflow watch this 90 second video  of it in action.

Hope this helps!!!