Moving from Silverlight 4 Beta to RC - Part 1

The other day I had finished up my Task-It Webinar, written a few blog posts, and knew the time had come to move from my Silverlight 4 Beta environment up to the latest RC (release candidate) bits that were released last Monday. What disappointed me when I went to the Silverlight 4 Information Page is that it told me what to install, but not what to uninstall first.

Uninstalling

I'm not entirely sure if I had to uninstall anything, or if installing the new stuff would just work, but in poking around the web I found posts stating that you must uninstall the following items first. Unfortunately I'm going by memory here and have not been able to find my way back to the magic page I found in the myriad of posts that I went through:

• Microsoft VisualStudio Beta 2
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Extended (apparently this must be done *before* the next one)
• Microsoft .NET Framework Client Profile
• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010
• WCF RIA Services Preview for Visual Studio 2010

While I was at it, I removed a bunch of other stuff, like Blend 3, Blend 4, the SDK's associated with them, and a bunch other stuff that was old. Of course, I didn't really want/need to keep any Silverlight 3 stuff around as I am developing Task-It in Silverlight 4. If I need a Silverlight 3 environment at some point I'll set it up in a virtual environment.

NOTE: One thing that I did not uninstall is the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Toolkit November 2009. The reason is that they have not released the March version yet, so if you uninstall this, you’ll end up having to reinstall it.

Installing

OK, now that I had all of that old stuff off my machine, now it was time to get the new stuff. For this part I liked Tim Heuer's post, A Guide to What has Changed in Silverlight 4 RC better than the Silverlight 4 Information Page.

• VisualStudio 2010 RC - I installed Ultimate, but you may not need that version. No harm, it's free for now anyway. I downloaded the .exe and the 3 .rar files, then ran the .exe. I then extracted the contents of the ISO (using WinZip) to a new directory, and now had Setup.exe, a bunch of .cab files and some other assorted stuff. I simply ran Setup.exe and chose custom install (only because I wanted to uncheck Visual C++...I don't really have a need for that)
• Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 - As mentioned in Tim's blog post, this installs this installs Silverlight developer runtime, SDK, tools, and this installs Silverlight developer runtime, SDK, tools, and WCF RIA Services.
• WCF RIA Services Toolkit March 2010 - I'm not sure if/when I'll need any of this stuff, but no harm in installing it anyway.
• Expression Blend 4 beta - Only if you plan to use Blend, which I do.
• Windows Phone Developer Tools - Only if you are interested in playing with Windows Phone 7 development.

Wrap Up

Hopefully I got those steps right. If anyone finds anything I've missed, please just add a comment to this post and I'll update it accordingly.