WTF Step by Step guide to installing Silverlight Tools

With Silverlight 4 shipping and Expression Blend 4 RC made available, now was a great time to update the Flash to Silverlight section on the Project Rosetta site.

My main goal was to update the Getting Started series to take advantage of new version 4 features.  I also took advantage of this update to greatly improve the Installation and Setup tutorial.

The content for the site is made for those with an interest in experimenting with Silverlight, who most likely do not have any .NET development experience or in some cases, even Windows.

As a first step, configuring your design and development environment for Silverlight can be a little daunting. Happily the installation process is now much simpler with the advent of the version 4 tools.

Nonetheless, as requested, I’ve put together a simple step by step walkthrough of the install process.

Working towards more Silverlight time and less “WTF?” time.

The new Setup tutorial takes full advantage of the Web Platform Installer (Web PI) which acts as a download and install tool for the needed Tools.  This makes writing the tutorial and installing much easier.

Along with the step by step guide, I’ve also updated the Getting Started series to reflect the new v4 tools and features, specifically CompositionTarget.Rendering (which is like ENTER_FRAME) and CompositeTransform (which makes transforms simpler than before).

Next month, we’ll be updating the Flash to Silverlight site with a new set of tutorials focused on Media (codecs, players, markers, etc) and how it compares to Flash media.

Now for some Taco Bell…