Professional Silverlight® 4

Chapter 2. Building Applications with Visual Studio

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Creating a Silverlight application in Visual Studio 2010

• Using the various tools and property editors available for Silverlight projects

• Learning how the project structure and deployment works with Silverlight

• How to attach a Silverlight application to an existing Silverlight application

• Learning how partial classes and event handlers work

• Debugging a Silverlight application, including the steps for remote debugging on an Apple Macintosh computer

Now that you have a grasp on what Silverlight is, and what it can offer you as an RIA developer, it's time to get into the details of building Silverlight applications.

CREATING A BASIC SILVERLIGHT APPLICATION

The best way to understand how Silverlight works in Visual Studio is by building an application, so go ahead and open up Visual Studio 2010.

Note

You'll notice that Visual Studio 2008 and earlier versions are not mentioned when discussing an IDE for building Silverlight 4 applications. Microsoft made a decision to support only Silverlight 4 in Visual Studio 2010, so you cannot use an earlier version of Visual Studio to design or compile Silverlight 4 applications. Note that you can multi-target with Visual Studio 2010 — you can choose to target a Silverlight 3 or Silverlight 4 application. You see where that comes in a little later in this chapter.

Once you've started Visual Studio, go ahead and start a new project. You can create a new project in one of several ways, ...