August 12th, 2009
Moving parts.
Installers; Friend of the user, scourge of the deadline, voodoo-priests of dependencies and inaccurate progress bars.
I’ve spent one too many hours now getting everything ready for Silverlight development. It wasn’t hard per-se, but there was a laundry list of things to be downloaded, installed, configured and sorted before I could get to building things and lest you suffer like I, hopefully this helps.
The video above shows the general process of getting things going. I’ve obviously edited out a good bit of the thumb twiddling parts, not so much to misrepresent anything, but because I don’t fancy serving up a 5.3 gigabyte video download to ever person who searches their way into this post. You can watch the video or following along with me here. Either way we’re gonna end up in the same place.
### What You’ll Need
I’d download everything linked below before you get started. It’s easier to stay in flow if you don’t have to sit and wait on a file to come down from the tubes before you can move along to the next step.
1. [VMWare Fusion 2.0.5][1]
2. [Microsoft Windows 7][2]
3. [Microsoft Expression Studio Trial][3]
4. [Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Trial][4]
5. [Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008][5]
6. [Silverlight 3 Tools][6]
7. [PowerISO 4.5][7]
[1]:http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/
[2]:http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/download.aspx
[3]:http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/
[4]:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=83c3a1ec-ed72-4a79-8961-25635db0192b&displaylang=en
[5]:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FBEE1648-7106-44A7-9649-6D9F6D58056E&displaylang=en
[6]:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9442B0F2-7465-417A-88F3-5E7B5409E9DD&displaylang=en
[7]:http://www.poweriso.com/download.htm
Once you’ve got everything downloaded, you’ll be ready to go.
### Installing VMWare and Windows 7
[Rob already covered this]. Good for him. You can watch the video to get the gist of what installing Windows 7 entails, but it’s pretty much like he says. Click-on-this easy.
One thing I do recommend is turning off 3D acceleration. For whatever reason, Blend and Design both run pig-dog slow when this option is turned on in VMWare.
### Installing the Trials
Since we’re not MSDN subscribers, and we wanted to give everything a good-and-thorough once over before we invested too heavily in the entire suite of tools, I opted to just use trials for this entire project. Microsoft graciously makes perfectly functional trials available for every piece of kit we need to do Silverlight development.
Now, the order I’m doing this in, in theory, doesn’t matter. But it’s the order I did it in, and everything seemed to work without any hitches, glitches or snitches, so I’m advising you do the same if only because I’m a superstitious person.
#### 1. Setup a shared folder
During your first run of your new VMWare machine, it probably asked you if you wanted to mirror or share out any folders. I generally select “None” on that screen, if only because I prefer turning things when I need them, than turning them off when they cause me problems.
I collected all my downloaded files into a folder on my Mac’s desktop, and connected that folder to the VMWare machine. You can do this whether the instance is running or not. Go to the “Virtual Machine” menu in VMWare, and select “Settings”. Click on “Sharing”. Click the checkbox next to “Share folders on your Mac” to enable sharing, and then click the “+” button to add a new share. Just navigate to whatever folder you stored all those downloads in.
Once this is setup, close the Settings and dive into your VMWare machine. You should see a folder on the desktop of the machine labeled “VMWare Shared Folders”. Open that up and look for the share you just created.
#### 2. Install Power ISO
Once you’ve got VMWare installed on your Mac, and you’ve got Windows 7 installed within a new virtual machine, you’ll want to get Power ISO running. One of the later trials we’ll install is only distributed as an ISO disk image, and as best I could tell, Windows 7 doesn’t have a way to mount them on its own.
Run the file you downloaded earlier of the PowerISO’s site and let it restart the instance.
#### 2. Install Expression Studio
Second verse, same as the first. Once the machine comes back up from its restart, open up the Expression Studio trial installer and let it run.
#### 3. Install Visual Studio 2008 Trial
Here’s where that PowerISO trial comes in handy. Launch PowerISO (it should be in the “Start Menu” under “All Programs” somewhere) and select “Mount” from it’s toolbar. Navigate to the downloaded installer collection and select the file “VS2008ProEdition90dayTrialENUX1435622.iso”. It should mount of the machine’s “E:” drive, unless you’ve got a weird VMWare configuration going.
Open File Explorer (the icon next to Internet Explorer’s big blue E) and click on “Computer”. You should see the VS2008 disc mounted on your E: drive. Double click to launch the installer, and run through setup. This will take an hour or more.
#### 4. Install Service Pack 1
Once Visual Studio is installed, install the service pack you downloaded. This will also take quite awhile.
#### 5. Install Silverlight 3 Tools
You know the drill by now.
#### 6. Run a Test
After all packages are installed, you’ll want to double check that the environment is properly configured. Find Visual Studio in your Program Menu and launch it. The first time round, it’s gonna prompt you to pick a language preference. Most of what I’ve found online regarding Silverlight development was written in C#, so that’s what I picked. Should you have a deep-rooted needed to code in Visual Basic, by all means pick that.
Once you get to the main screen, create a new project in Visual Studio. From the available list of templates, pick “Silverlight Application”. When it prompts you asking whether you’d like it to create a website for the project, click “Yes”. Trust me, this saves you pain later.
Once the project has been created, go searching for Expression Blend. After it loads, open the project you just created in Visual Studio. From with the project, open MainPage.xaml. Add anything you want to the canvas and hit save.
Return to Visual Studio, and click build and run your project (easiest way is just hit the green play button up top).
If IE launches, and you see your project, you’re good to go.