Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 Designer Support
The Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 provide several features for creating applications in Silverlight version 3 Beta. The Silverlight Tools designer support is a subset of the features in the WPF Designer. For information about the tools that you can use to create Silverlight-based applications, see Silverlight Tools.
Project Templates
When you install the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008, a Silverlight project type is added to Visual Basic and Visual C#. The Silverlight project has a Silverlight Application template and a Silverlight Class Library template, as shown in the following illustration. Other Silverlight templates are also installed.
.png "Silverlight Project Templates")
Designer Support
When you create a new Silverlight project, you will see many of the tools and windows that you are familiar with in Visual Studio. The following illustration shows an example of a Silverlight application opened in Visual Studio.
.png "A Silverlight application opened in Visual Studio")
Supported Features
The following table lists the features that are supported in the Silverlight Tools for Silverlight projects.
Feature |
Notes |
|---|---|
Full XAML editing is supported. |
IntelliSense and XAML formatting is the same as in the WPF Designer's XAML editor, except that Silverlight types are targeted instead of WPF types. |
Silverlight controls and corresponding icons are displayed in the Toolbox. |
Silverlight controls are displayed alphabetically in a tab on the Toolbox. |
The Toolbox with drag-and-drop support for XAML view is supported. |
Useful for adding Silverlight controls from non-default XML namespaces. When a control is added, a reference and the XML namespace are added automatically. |
The Document Outline window and tag navigator are available when editing XAML. |
|
Navigation features for interacting with the code are supported. |
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Auto-update between XAML view and other WPF Designer components is supported. |
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Errors are reported in the Error List window. |
Unsupported Features
The following table lists the features that are not supported in the Silverlight Tools for Silverlight projects.
Feature |
Notes |
|---|---|
Design view is not supported. |
An interactive design surface is not supported. |
A preview window is not supported. |
The tools for Silverlight 2 did include a read-only preview window. However, the tools for Silverlight 3 Beta do not include a preview window. |
The Properties window is not supported. |
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Globalization features are not supported. |
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Automatic resource reloading is not supported. |
Changes to resources that are contained in other files require a rebuild before they are visible in the loaded XAML. |
See Also
Tasks
How to: Create a New Silverlight Project