Does VS 2008 SP1 support Property Editing for Silverlight 3?

Question

I'm a Silverlight newbie. Just downloaded version 3.0 after the Mix announcement. I'm running VS 2008 SP1. When I select a design element in the preview pane or in XAML, the properties window is disabled and displays

Property Editing Not Available

I can open the solution in Blend and have no problems with it's property editor. So within Visual Studio, I'm forced to enter everything in the XAML pane and rely on Intellisense.

Is something wrong with my installation or environment? Or am I supposed to switch back and forth between Expression Blend and Visual Studio (I can't believe that should be the case).

Answer 1

There is nothing wrong with your installation or environment. The XAML designer/editor in VS2008 is very limited in what it offers for XAML editing whatever the version of Silverlight, being really just a rendering engine at the moment.

Expression Blend is the visual editor of choice for now - there are 3rd party editors available (such as XAMLCruncher and Kaxaml) but they don't really support XAML with code-behind classes.

Additionally the Blend 3 preview that was released to support SL3 seems to have a few improvements which address previously inferior experience of directly editing XAML in Blend (notably IntelliSense).

Answer 2

I had the same problem with Visual studio 2010 and Silverlight 5.0. It was intermittent.

One thing I found to help is to switch the XAML page to show Design view and then switch back to Code view or vice versa. If you have hybrid view, just temporarily switch.

I did that and it just worked fine. I do n't know the reason it worked but it did.

Answer 3

Is something wrong with my installation or environment? Or am I supposed to switch back and forth between Expression Blend and Visual Studio (I can't believe that should be the case).

You'll find you need to do that a lot for both Silverlight and WPF if you want to make full use of the UI controls.

I find VS incredibly slow and clunky for designing and rendering XAML and much prefer Expression. Switching between the two is no big deal as really one's for code and ones for design.

Answer 4

I haven't download the Silverlight 3 Beta yet, but the Silverlight 2 designer intergration in visual studio is very poor.

VS 2010 is suppose to have better support for XAML Editing in WPF and Silverlight. So for now, you'll have to find the right balance between Blend and VS.

Answer 5

SilverLight 3.0 beta just shipped. VS2008 SP1 shipped last year. It would be surprising if it supported SilverLight 3.0 out of the box, and more suprising if the VS support that ships with SilverLight 3.0 beta were not "beta" quality.

If you find problems, then be certain to report them to Microsoft.