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My Silverlight War Room

Thursday, March 12 2009 - silverlight, tools

Today, Shawn Wildermuth shared what he uses to develop Silverlight applications. Its a good list of mostly essential tools if you are going to work with Silverlight. While you do not need Blend, for example, you are severely handicapping yourself if you develop with Silverlight without it.

Shawn’s post made me realize how many tools we actually use to work with Silverlight. Silverlight 2 has only been out publicly (if you include betas) for about a year and look at all the stuff we can use. On the one hand its great we have so many tools already, on the other hand, that’s a lot to get familiar with if you are just diving into Silverlight.

Here is my list of tools, which is mostly the same as Shawn’s, with my own commentary. I broke it down into “must have’s”, “why wouldn’t you use these?” and “if it floats your boat”.

Must have’s

Visual Studio + SP1: Need this
Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio: You need these to do Silverlight in Visual Studio 2008
Expression Blend 2 + SP1: Don’t fight this. It’s a fantastic tool.
Silverlight 2 DataGrid Update (Dec 2008): Bug Fixes for the DataGrid.

Why Wouldn’t You Use These?

FireBug: (Firefox Web Development plugin). Debugging is a must. Save yourself the heartache and use it.
Web Development Helper: Debugging add-in for IE 7 and 8. Learn it, live it, love it.
Fiddler2: Debugging HTTP network requests. Get the picture, you need a tool like this.

If it Floats Your Boat

Expression Design: I am no designer, but it is nice for converting images to XAML.
Expression Media Encoder: Video and audio conversion.
Deep Zoom Composer: Cool zooming and interactive photo dives. Check it out.
KAXAML: 3rd party XAML editor.
Silverlight Toolkit: Great additional Silverlight controls by the Microsoft Silverlight team
Silverlight Contrib: Page Brooks' has done us all a service by creating the fantastic open source project. The CoolMenu is my favorite.
Silverlight.FX: Nikhil Kothari's transitions are very sweet
Prism for Silverlight: Great tools for architecting Silverlight apps
Unity: Dependency Injection that works great with Prism and Silverlight.
Ninject: Another great DI tool.
Silverlight Unit Testing Framework: unit testing solution for Silverlight 2 applications
Resharper: Works great for refactoring in .NET, including Silverlight

Top 3rd Party Sivlerlight Control Suites (not free)

Infragistics controls suite
Telerik control suite
DevExpress control suite
ComponentOne control suite

12 comment(s)

Silverlight Travel » My Silverlight War Room wrote on Thursday, March 12 2009

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Romuald Boulanger wrote on Thursday, March 12 2009

Hi,

I don't see Silverlight Extensions :-). You can test this library here http://www.slextensions.net

Jeff g wrote on Thursday, March 12 2009

Don't forget Xaml Power Toys

Steve wrote on Thursday, March 12 2009

Don't forget WCF Test Client :)

What I Use for Silverlight Development wrote on Friday, March 13 2009

Three makes it a meme, right? :) Shawn and John recently posted about their Silverlight toolkit, so I

Matt Casto wrote on Friday, March 13 2009

One thing I've thought about recently is - why isn't there an express version of Blend? It's listed on both your and Shawn's list of tools as a "must have" and yet the only version available for free is a trial.

I believe the cost is a huge sticking point for people just looking at what it takes to get into Silverlight development. Sure, students can get a free version through Dreamspark, but that's a lot of extra hassle.

The first place people look when first getting into Silverlight development is the Get Started page on Silverlight.net. I wonder how many people leave after going to download Blend and seeing that its only a trial?

When I was a student it wasn't free to do Flash development, so I never pursued it, and never ended up learning it later on in live.

Kevin wrote on Friday, March 13 2009

I've also found these validators on CodePlex www.codeplex.com/.../SilverlightVali to be helpful. I'd be interested in hearing what else is out there for declaring the validation in the XAML

Ben Hayat wrote on Saturday, March 14 2009

For 3rd party products I'd certainly add the new products from Intersoft: www.intersoftpt.com/.../Default.aspx Although still in CTP but looks very solid. They have a great client side to Astoria (ADO.Net Data Services) and very powerful Data Presenter. This company does an excellent job in UI space!

..Ben

Unit Testing wrote on Monday, March 23 2009

Another product is SilverUnit - you can run your Silverlight unit tests with MS Test or NUnit

www.typemock.com/.../Silverlight_uni

club penguin wrote on Thursday, June 18 2009

It's listed on both your and Shawn's list of tools as a "must have" and yet the only version available for free is a trial. I believe the cost is a huge sticking point for people just looking at what it takes to get into Silverlight development.

George Foreman outdoor grill wrote on Monday, July 20 2009

Visual Studio is indeed necessary, but I really wished they could improve it a little more, it still has so many bugs.

Towel Cake wrote on Monday, August 24 2009

Pretty good post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say

that I have really enjoyed reading your blog posts. Any way I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon.