Silverlight delivers the richest set of capabilities available to developers today through a Web‐browser plug‐in. Silverlight 5 makes further advances in media, 3d visualization and application development and user experience, adding over 40 new features. The Silverlight 5 Release provides developers their first opportunity to start exploring these new capabilities.
Breaking changes from Silverlight 4 and information on quirks mode and how it enables you to run existing SL4 applications on 5 without issues.
History of the different versions of Silverlight including features and release dates going back to Silverlight 1. Also includes WSUS update GUIDs and other helpful information.
The Silverlight 5 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 require Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio. Install it before installing any other Silverlight bits.
Install this on an existing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express) install in order to get the design and development tools for Silverlight as well as WCF RIA Services. This is the most important installation package for Silverlight developers. The typical developer install consists of the Silverlight 5 Tools (this package), the Silverlight 5 Toolkit, and optionally Expression Blend. You do not need to uninstall the Silverlight 5 Beta or RC before installing this package. Doing so won't hurt, but it isn't required.
The 32 bit developer runtime is included in the tools installation, but also downloadable separately here for use on test machines and other places where the additional debug information could be helpful. As this is both larger and slightly slower than the end-user runtime, it should not be installed on end-user machines except for temporary testing.
This is the 64 bit developer runtime for Windows. Developers targeting 64 bit browsers on Windows should use this for testing.
This is useful for debugging applications on Mac OSX. End-users should not install this unless directed to do so.
This is the 32 bit Windows end-user runtime. Developers should not install this on machines to be used for Silverlight development.
This is the 64 bit Windows end-user runtime. Developers should not install this on machines to be used for Silverlight development.
This is the 32 bit Mac OSX end-user runtime.
The Silverlight 5 SDK is included in the tools installation, but also included here for convenience.
The Silverlight 5 toolkit, downloadable from CodePlex, adds additional features to Silverlight, including the 3d project templates. The toolkit is not installed as part of the main tools installer, so make sure you install it from here.
Expression Blend is a visual UX design product which works along side Visual Studio. If you've strugged with hand-coding animations, control templates, styling, or other things in XAML, try out Expression Blend. (Note, the version installed with the Silverlight 5 RC works with the Silverlight 5 release)
WCF RIA Services enables application developers to write complex multi-tier data-oriented applications using a model that is as simple as client/server, but allows seamless sharing of logic and data. This is included in the default Silverlight 5 Tools installer.
Web Platform Installer is an easy way to install all the required Silverlight 5 bits. It's also used for many other Microsoft products.
The help .chm file for Silverlight. Most developers do not need to download this file.
Microsoft Software License Terms for Silverlight 5
To use the 3d content pipeline and other XNA tools in default Silverlight 3d application template, you'll need XNA Game Studio 4.0.
If you wish to compile custom shaders (such as in the default 3d project template) you need a recent version of the DirectX SDK for Windows.
For people targeting Silverlight 4, you can get the runtime here. If you're unsure which version to pick, get the latest (Silverlight 5) unless instructed otherwise.
The free download will let you begin building Silverlight applications quickly, but does not have all of the features of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Professional.
Add-on and pre-requisite files for Visual Studio 2010 to develop Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services applications
The Web Platform Installer makes it easy to install a variety of great tools. This package installes Silverlight 4 tools for Visual Studio and the RIA Services toolkit.
Microsoft's open source Microsoft Media Platform: Player Framework enables developers to quickly deploy a robust, scalable, customizable media player for IIS Smooth Streaming delivery.
Expression Studio 4 Ultimate includes four design and development tools for building rich desktop experiences and Silverlight for standards-based web sites and streaming video.
Expression Encoder imports and encodes video files, produces live webcasts, enhances media with watermarks and advertising, and publishes with Silverlight. Free version does not include H.264 support. Expression Encoder Pro comes with Expression Studio 4 Ultimate.
Prepare images for use with the Deep Zoom feature in Silverlight
The Silverlight PivotViewer makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data on the web in ways that are powerful, informative, and valuable. PivotViewer lets us present thousands of things at once and visualize them in a way that exposes value from the group.
ESL, "eclipse tools for Micorsoft Silveright", is open source tool integrated with the Eclipse development platform that enables developers to create applications that run on the Microsoft Silverlight.
Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight(NESL) is a library of components that expose select Windows 7. The current version of NESL provides access to Windows 7 features like Sensors, Portable Devices, Speech, Taskbar and more.