Preparing the development environment

We want to take full advantage of modern technologies. First of all, we must install the latest tools and begin working on configurations. Later, we will be able to use our existing knowledge to create different kinds of RIAs for SharePoint 2010, using Silverlight 4 — the newest kid-on-the-block from Microsoft.

Note

Silverlight 4 is backward-compatible with its previous version, Silverlight 3. Therefore, when an example uses a feature found only in Silverlight 4, you will find a note explaining this situation. Most of the examples work for both Silverlight versions. However, we will also take advantage of some of the new features found in Silverlight 4.

The only requirements underpinning the development and integration of RIAs into SharePoint 2010 sites are understanding the basics of the C# programming language, ASP.NET, XAML code, and the Visual Studio IDE. We will cover any other requirements in our journey through the creation of many different kinds of RIAs to run in a SharePoint 2010 site. First, we must download and install various Silverlight development tools. We need Visual C# 2010 Professional, Premium, or Ultimate installed, in order to successfully complete the installations explained in the following section. Visual C# 2010 allows us to choose the desired Silverlight version (for example, version 3 or version 4). The following sections and chapters will show Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate screenshots. If you use other versions, some elements that appear in the screenshots could be different but the steps are all valid for the aforementioned versions.