Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010

The Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is an add-on for Visual Studio 2010 that provides tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services. It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. It extends the existing Silverlight 3 features and multi-targeting capabilities in Visual Studio 2010 to also support creating, designing, building and debugging Silverlight 4 applications. The tooling supports:

  • Elevated trust settings
  • Out of Browser window and chrome settings
  • Streamlined F5 for out of browser applications

These tools include full intellisense for markup extensions including data bindings and resource bindings.

WCF RIA Services Support

The tooling also includes design time support for WCF RIA Services with the following highlighted features:

  • Implicit Styles
  • Databinding enhancements
    • StringFormat
    • NullableValue
  • Validation
    • IDataErrorInfo
    • INotifyDataErrorInfo
  • ICommand, CommandParameter 
  • RichTextBox, Viewbox and WebBrowser controls
  • Creating RTL pages

    The Data Sources window and databinding picker (shown below) makes it easy to set up a “forms over data” application.

Figure 9

Visual Studio 2010 Tooling Support for Silverlight 4

Automatic Layout

Visual Studio 2010 supports designing “size to content” driven layouts in the designer surface. This is helpful for design containers that don’t naturally want to have a fixed root size (User Controls, Pages etc).

Figure 10

Defining the Layout

The Grid Designer lets you easily switch between fixed and auto layout rows and columns.

Figure 11

Automatic Sizing of Rows and Columns

Enhanced Property Editing

New property editing features are included in Visual Studio 2010 such as brush/color, font, and image property editors.

Figure 12

Choosing a Color

Figure 13

Choosing an Image File

Styling and Resources

Finding and applying styles and resources through Visual Studio 2010 is supported in the property browser window, including a preview of the style.

Figure 14

Finding and Applying a Style

You can also extract a Resource from an existing value. Just right click and choose Extract Value to Resource, then name the style and choose the Resource dictionary.

Figure 15

Extracting a Resource