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Wednesday, 08 February 2012

Silverlight 5 Upgrade Woes

We recently struggled to upgrade the UI of On Key, Pragma’s Enterprise Asset Management System (EAMS) to Silverlight 5.  We struggled with getting Silverlight 5 binaries for a lot of the open source projects (Moq, Castle.Core), but it was the lack of development tooling support in Visual Studio 2010 that really disappointed us.  I can understand that the open source projects are slack in providing support for Silverlight 5.  We solved the problem by getting the source code and creating Silverlight 5 binaries ourselves.  However our hands are cut off when it comes the development tooling in Visual Studio.  Expression Blend 5 is still only in preview edition with no word on when a final version that supports the SL 5 RTW will be provided.  Code Analysis (FxCop) and Code Metrics analysis are broken for Silverlight 5 projects.  I find it very disappointing that MS didn’t make sure that all parts of the development tooling surrounding Silverlight 5 was working by the time that Silverlight 5 went RTW.  Hopefully these issues will be resolved soon, but one sort of gets the impression that with no more momentum behind Silverlight it might take quite a while Sad smile