Playing With Silverlight 2.0 Tools

Following yesterday's announcement I installed Silverlight on my PC. It's just under 5MB so didn't take very long. I also installed the Silverlight tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1. these are 72MB in size and includes the Silverlight 2 developer runtime, SDK and tools for Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 plus additions to the help files. If you haven't got the full Visual Studio (and upgraded with SP1) you can use the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express. Once you have these installed you can create new Silverlight projects and debug, even remotely to a Silverlight app running on a Mac.

The image pictured is the Silverlight clock from the samples. It just displays a working clock superimposed over a background image. The clock components: face and hands) are described and animated using xaml. The C# code is loaded when the page loads calculates the initial angle of all three hands and sets the xaml objects properties accordingly. Nothing too complex there though I think you'd find designing the xaml with the visual tools far easier than by hand.