Silverlight SDK Versions And Aggravations
Today I spent the morning trying to figure out some of the reasons for my aggravation with Silverlight development. The first thing I discovered was that I had the RC (Release Candidate) version of the Silverlight 1.0 SDK instead of the RTW (Release To Web) version. This can certainly lead to many aggravating errors and problems.
The only way to tell the difference between these two versions is to look at some timestamps. The Release Candidate version has Timestamp July 26, 2007. The RTW (Release To Web) version has Timestamp November 15, 2007.
Similarly, the Silverlight.chm RC help file is dated 7/26/2007 while the Silverlight.chm RTW is dated 10/29/2007. The Visual Studio 2005 template will refuse to update because it is already installed so you'll need to manually copy the SilverlightJSApplication.zip file into the C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#\Silverlight folder. Note the difference in file size and modified date.
The next thing I looked into is the XAML namespaces which give me a lot of problems. The xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007" namespace causes errors in the Visual Studio 2005 XAML Designer and XamlPad. I always have to change this to xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" before I can see how my XAML will render. I've decided that this must be by design. The "client" in the Silverlight XAML namespace must refer to the browser client and is not valid when using a WPF tool. However this is pretty aggravating because it makes it difficult to preview the user interface.
Then I downloaded the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK which includes Silverlight help collections that integrate into the Microsoft Document Explorer. This includes both the Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2.0 Beta documentation but you have to manually register them by following the intructions in the readme file.
The Silverlight "HyperlinkButton" control is designed for Silverlight 2.0, not Silverlight 1.0 so that does not help me create hyperlinks. I think my next step is to investigate Visual Studio 2008 and Silverlight 2.0.