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What I Use for Silverlight Development

I was recently re-paving my machine and thought that it might be fun to show off what I use to prepare a machine for Silverlight development...so here goes:

Visual Studio + SP1: Goes without saying.
Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio: 'nuff said.
Expression Blend 2 + SP1: My favorite XAML tool...yeah its for developers too...promise!
Expression Design: I use this tool to convert .ai and .eps files to Silverlight XAML. Mostly when I need to use clipart in my Silverlight Apps.
Expression Media Encoder: To create Silverlight Videos.
Deep Zoom Composer: Create Deep Zoom Images and create SL projects with it.
Adobe Illustrator XAML Export Plugin: New version of the plugin exports to Silverlight easily!
KAXAML: A great interactive XAML editor.
Silverlight 2 DataGrid Update (Dec 2008): Bug Fixes for the DataGrid.
Silverlight Toolkit: Charting, Themes, Silverlight Testing Framework and more...
Silverlight Contrib: Page Brooks' open source project including port of SharpZipLib, Color picker, cool menu and great Silverlight specific code snippets (et al.).
Silverlight.FX: Nikhil Kothari's great set of Silverlight code including great transitions and effective library (and a MVVM library).
FireBug: Firefox Web Development plugin.
IE Developer Toolbar: Great way to view the HTML in IE7 (automatically included in IE8).
Fiddler2: A HTTP Debugging Proxy for debugging network requests...a MUST HAVE.
Prism for Silverlight: For architecting large Silverlight projects.
Rockscroll: Not Silverlight specific but a great replacement for the scrollbar in VS.
World of Goo: You have to take a break from coding...don't you?

Anything I missed that you can't live without?

UPDATE: Great feedback found some more I failed to list:

Reflector: View approximations of the real code and metadata of .NET assemblies (works with Silverlight assemblies too).
Silverlight Spy: A great way to look at how Silverlight Applications work and works with reflector to see the code too.
Paint.NET: An open source image editor that does most of what I need for simple image editing, sizing and touch-ups for free!
Silverlight Extensions: Another control library with some cool features.
Blacklight Silverlight Controls: A great free suite of controls unlike I've seen anywhere else.

Mar, 12, 2009, 12:44 AM |
15 Comment(s)
Tag(s): Silverlight

Comments:

paint.net?

Kristofer (Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 )

Hello,

http://www.slextensions.net/ definitely worth a look at ^^

Laurent (Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 )

Can't live without Resharper for any Visual Studio development!

Bob Thomson (Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 )

Hi,

Good list, add this one: http://silverlightspy.com/silverlightspy/introduction/

Cheers.

vtortola (Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 )

Hey, what happened with Silverlight Spy?

Koen Zwikstra (Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 )

Ah. Rockscroll. I attended your presentation in Minneapolis last month and I almost thought you were using VS 2010.

If you are really looking for a good time with World of Goo, then you should pick up a HP tx2 multi-touch tablet and throw Windows 7 on it. WoG wasn't designed for M-T but it is *very* intuitive and easy to play on the screen. Unfortunately it is the only game that I've found that really works well with M-T.

Allen Sanborn (Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 )

Thanks for the Great List, Shawn!

New Silverlight Developers will love this blog post.

Alex (Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 )

Psd2Xaml (try to convert psd and swf to xaml)
http://flowlabs.net/psd2xaml.aspx

Laurent (Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 )

We like uses these control sets too

http://www.vectorlight.net/

Mohammed Mudassir Azeemi (Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 )

Here's the url for the Adobe Illustrator XAML Export plugin:

http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/

Emmanuel Morales (Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 )

The PSD2XAML isn't working for me. I'll try to submit a bug.

Shawn Wildermuth (Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 )

Here's the url for the Adobe Illustrator XAML Export plugin:

http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/

Emmanuel Morales (Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 )

Good list Shawn, thanks for complining it.

On a personal note, I'll join the commenter who mentioned Resharper. I can't imagine my life adding xmlns manually anymore. R# FTW.

-- Justin

Justin Angel (Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 )

I don't use Resharper or CodeRush as they seem to slow down Visual Studio and are a pain to configure the way I like. I am old-school...before Intellisense...

Shawn Wildermuth (Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 )

Thanks,it's really useful.

kevin fan (Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 )

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What I Use for Silverlight Development