Learning Silverlight #2 - Tooling Up

This is a series of posts of my journey learning Silverlight one weekend:

• Learning Silverlight
• Learning Silverlight #1 – where to start
• Learning Silverlight #2 – Tooling Up (this post)
• Learning Silverlight #3 – Getting Started
• Learning Silverlight #4 – Sample Project

I already have Visual Studio 2010 Professional installed as I do a lot of server-side .net day-to-day. Adding the Silverlight tools was a piece of cake using the fantastic MS Web Platform Installer.

Next up was to get Expression Blend, didn't spend any time looking into the different versions, just went for the 60 trial of Expression Blend Ultimate. I did have a previously intalled RC but that had expired so removed it and went for the latest version. For some strange reason the installer didn't work when downloaded with Chrome (something about not a valid win32 application) but did it again in IE and surprise surprise it worked. I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't work with Chrome so will give the benefit of the doubt and put it down to a bad download. Other than that, installation was plain sailing.

I installed the entire Expression Ultimate Suite, whether I'll use anything other than Blend I don't know but as disk space is cheap and plentiful it was the easy option :)

Seemingly that's all that is needed to get up and running to develop Silverlight so next will be onto actually learning something.

UPDATE: If you don't follow this series of posts beyond here, it is also worth downloading and installing the Silverlight Toolkit from codeplex.