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I’ve been holding back on moving to Visual Studio 2010 RTM because I wanted to keep all the bits that I had on my machine working including the Windows Phone 7 preview developer bits handed out at MIX10.

But I was finding it more painful to stay there ( because e.g. I had products demanding .NET Framework 4.0 in order to install ) and new bits just came out for Windows Phone 7 development so I thought I’d upgrade.

I installed Visual Studio 2010 RTM. That was painless for me although uninstalling the previous bits took a long time because I messed up the uninstall order and ended up in a situation where I’d not got Visual Studio installed but still had some Visual Studio add-on tooling installed and the latter wasn’t happy about uninstalling without the former being present.

I fixed this in the end by putting VS2010 RC back on my box whilst uninstalling some of the other add-on bits. My mistake.

With Visual Studio 2010 RTM installed I added the extra bits that I need ( for now ) which were;

The latest drop of the Silverlight 4 tools (RC 2) for Visual Studio 2010 RTM

that gives me the developer runtime, the tooling for VS2010, the SDK and WCF RIA Services RC2.

I did a quick “hello world” in Silverlight 4 to make sure that seemed to be working (and noticed that the RIA Services templates looked to be present) and that worked fine so then I installed;

The Silverlight 4 April 2010 Toolkit

That seemed to work out ok and I made sure I could add a quick bit of Toolkit magic to my “hello world” project ( I threw a quick Chart onto my design surface ).

Then I thought I’d add in the WCF RIA Services toolkit;

The WCF RIA Services Toolkit April 2010 

and that seemed fine although I haven’t tested it out yet ( but I want it for its Soap/Json endpoints for Domain Services ).

Next it was time to reach out to my creative side so I went and grabbed Expression Blend;

Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate

and that installed fine. I did a quick smoke-test to ensure I could make a Silverlight 4 application in there and that looked like it was working fine.

The only thing remaining then was the bits for Windows Phone 7. By the way – there’s a caveat around this installation so make sure that you read it before installing because there’s a problem with Authenticode signed assemblies.

If you’ve read that and you’re happy to continue then you can grab;

Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP – April Refresh

Expression Blend Add-In Preview 2 for Windows Phone

I installed them in that order and made sure that I could create, run and debug a new phone application after installing the first package and that I could do the same in Blend after the second package.

And…all seems to be good. First thing I took a look at was the new Microsoft.Phone.Execution.dll assembly which looks to have the WindowsPhoneEvents.Pause and Resume events – cool :-)


Posted Fri, Apr 30 2010 4:40 PM by mtaulty

Comments

Pete Sykes wrote re: VS2010, Silverlight, Blend, Phone 7 Upgrade
on Fri, Apr 30 2010 7:10 PM

Hi Mike,

I notice that the download installs VS2010 Express. Can you have VS2010 Express and Ultimate installed at the same time then?

mtaulty wrote re: VS2010, Silverlight, Blend, Phone 7 Upgrade
on Fri, Apr 30 2010 11:42 PM

Hi Pete,

I'd already installed Ultimate so, for me, I end up with additions to Ultimate rather than a separate installation of Express.

Mike.

Community Blogs wrote Silverlight Cream for April 30, 2010 -- #852
on Sat, May 1 2010 6:28 AM

In this Issue: Michael Washington , Tim Greenfield , Jaime Rodriguez , and The WP7 Team . Shoutouts:

The Luddite Developer wrote re: VS2010, Silverlight, Blend, Phone 7 Upgrade
on Sun, May 2 2010 9:58 AM

SEVEN seperate installs!!!

Countless Uninstalls!!!

AND because you are still having to work with release candidates and community previews you will still have to uninstall and reinstall many of these components again AND in the correct order.

Then there is the issue of what will break in our existing VS2008 & SL3 projects when we upgrade.  No tables or charts to tell us what is compatible with what.

How much time does Microsoft think developers have got to waste doing all of this crap?

What happened to the idea of an Integrated Developer Environment (IDE).

One install and obsolete components updated autmatically is what is required.

Everyone is preaching the doctrine of a good User Experience, what about the developer experience?

Lets get rid of this disintegrated chaos now.

mtaulty wrote re: VS2010, Silverlight, Blend, Phone 7 Upgrade
on Tue, May 4 2010 11:15 AM

Hey,

I was just trying to be helpful :-) but I take your point.

I listed six separate installations above. Some of them you can get combined via the Web Platform Installer but I chose to separate them out for completeness.

2 of them are entirely to do with Windows Phone development so would be optional for a lot of Silverlight developers.

One of them is the RIA Services toolkit - not every developer will need this either. This is *NOT* RIA Services - that functionality is already present. This is the additional toolkit.

So...for most developers here we're talking about;

1) Silverlight tools

2) Silverlight toolkit

3) Expression Blend

and I think it's worth remembering that these tools have not yet released so a lot of developers won't even be looking at them yet.

Mike.

The Luddite Developer wrote re: VS2010, Silverlight, Blend, Phone 7 Upgrade
on Tue, May 4 2010 3:50 PM

Mike,

Sorry, I did not mean to put all of this down to you.

Unfortunately, you just happened to blog about something that I think needs to be looked at rather urgently.

If you happen to think that developers are being given an overwhelming number of installation tasks in order to keep up with current development tools then I would appreciate if the feedback was passed along. Microsoft have introduced an add-on model for Visual Studio and this helps with new features (Silverlight, RIA, Phone Tools) being added out of sync, but in other areas, particularly compatibility and number of installs and UNinstalls it can be very confusing.

It was really confuing to hear Scott Guthrie announce the launch of Silverlight 4 and then find out that the 'Silverlight tool for VS2010' is still just a Release Candidate.  This means that you may have to perform up to 5 uninstalls before you can install the RTM. In this area is it really not possible for Microsoft to automate uninstalls for previous beta's and release candidates? A kind of polluter pays policy, where Microsoft cleans up the mess the beta's and RC's leave behind.

I know that the pace of new technology and the requirement for new development tools is responsible for this situation, and that developers would be screaming at Microsoft if they did not provide these tools in a timely manner.

I do like your blog and your videos, so keep up the good work.

Pete Sykes wrote re: VS2010, Silverlight, Blend, Phone 7 Upgrade
on Wed, May 5 2010 10:17 AM

Thanks Mike - it was the installer saying it was installing VS2010 Express that put me off.  I'll ignore that now :-)

senf wrote re: VS2010, Silverlight, Blend, Phone 7 Upgrade
on Wed, May 5 2010 10:37 PM

Thanks for sharing this, I just was about to do the exact same thing.