Silverlight & Visual Studio 2010 Beta
As you probably know, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 was released to MSDN subscribers and soon will be released to general public here.
What is new in this release for Silverlight developers?
First of all – Silverlight is a first class citizen in this release, like WPF for example.
More good news - now we will be able to create/manage both version of Silverlight projects (2 and 3)!
When you choosing to create a new Silverlight projects, you will be prompted with dialog which allows to select the version of the technology:
Even after creating the project, you still could add new Silverlight project to the solution and once again you will be able to choose the version:
The created projects has correct references to the selected versions:
Silverlight 2
Silverlight 3
Visual studio will create Test pages accordingly:
Silverlight 2
Silverlight 3
Both of projects has same default compilation target placement:
The project properties screen will give you the chance to change target compilation version
Same controls could be used as references and as linked sources:
Properties editor with element preview and has many improvements (like brush visualization, data binding helper, etc.):
...and the best of all – the editor is fully interactive (for both versions)!
The Beta could be installed side by side with Visual Studio 2008.
Some things you should know, when using this Beta – there are some performance issues with the Cider (UI editor) and some bugs with XAML editor (like ability to use/compile Silverlight 3 features within Silverlight 2 projects).
Also I experienced some freezes/crushes of environment.
Generally – the Beta is pretty stable and worth to download and try!
More Silverlight 3 stuff to come! Stay tuned…
Enjoy,
Alex