Inside the Silverlight 2.0 SDK

The Silverlight SDK contains a couple of interesting gems that aren’t appearent in the docs.  I’ll let everyone espouse the virtues of the runtime for the time being, I’d like to introduce you to a couple of tools in the SDK:

• Chiron: (\program files\microsoft sdks\silverlight\v2.0\tools\chiron): A command-line tool for generating .xap files.  If you are building your projects without VS 2008 or want more control over the xap creation (including adding your own files), this is a valuable tool.
• Silverlight.js (\program files\microsoft sdks\silverlight\v2.0\tools): This file still exists in the v2.0 SDK.  Unlike most demos that use either the object tag or the ASP.NET silverlight control, some projects still need a client-side browser detection (and other features) of this JavaScript file.  Notably the Silverlight.IsInstalled is a godsend for anyone that needs to optionally show Silverlight content.

What’s missing?

• Seadragon: There does not seem to be any Seadragon tools or examples out of the box.  Hopefully this is coming soon.  To be able to create your own multi-scale images would be really useful right now!
• silverlight.xsd (or wpfe.xsd): You can use the Design surface in VS 2008 to edit your XAML by hand (and get intellisense) but it would be great if we could get the .xsd so we can use the XML Editor (you need the xsd to get intellisense) as its a lot faster than the “Cider” editor.