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.
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.
Supported Features
The following table lists the features that are supported in the Silverlight Tools for Silverlight projects.
Feature |
Notes |
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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. |
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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