Yesterday, I installed Silverlight 2 beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 with the latest version of Silverlight Tools. No issues with the install. I was all ready to start developing something simple, yet cool. Opened VS2008, started up a new Silverlight Application, got the Silverlight environment in front of me, along with the Silverlight Toolbox. First, let’s try adding a label. Oh, wait . . . can’t do that. Labels have been deprecated in WPF in favor of the TextBlock. Ok. Let’s add that. Click on TextBlock, go over to the designer area, attempt to draw a new TextBlock. Nothing. Hmm. Ok, clicked on TextBlock and dragged over to the designer area and dropped. Nothing. Hmm.
Turns out, after searching for others with this problem, that currently, you can’t drag ‘n’ drop into the designer area. You can, however, drag ‘n’ drop into the XAML markup area, and your XAML tags will show up just fine. Ok. That works. Of course, the downside is that you have to position everything very manually for the moment. I guess I can live with that since I am a hand-coder anyway for HTML. Shouldn’t be much different.
I’m glad to say that I was able to set up a quick little app that doesn’t do a whole lot . . . just presents a TextBlock, a TextBox and a Button. Now, I’m off to wire it up to something interesting . . .
