Microsoft Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is a self-explanatory label; nonetheless, the solution is an add-on for the first service pack of Visual Studio 2008, allowing developers to put together applications based on the latest version of Silverlight. The Redmond company indicated that the Silverlight 3 Tools were designed to integrate with VS 2008 SP1 running on top of Windows 7, but also Windows Vista and Windows XP, including SP3.

“Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes: Visual Basic and C# Project templates; Intellisense and code generators for XAML; Debugging of Silverlight applications; Remote debugging of Silverlight applications for Mac; Web reference support; WCF Templates; Team Build and command line build support; Support for cached transparent platform extensions and Support for Silverlight 3 Out-of-Browser applications,” Microsoft said.

Amy Dullard, a program manager at Microsoft on the Visual Web Developer team under Visual Studio, explained that getting Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installed required a tad of preparation. In this sense, developers will need to first install Visual Web Developer feature in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 before the tools.

“This is separate from the free Visual Web Developer Express. If VWD is not already installed with your instance of Visual Studio, you can add the feature in Visual Studio's Maintenance Mode. Open Add/Remove Programs from the Control Panel. Right click on Visual Studio 2008 and choose Remove/Change. This will bring up Maintenance Mode. On the second screen, Choose Add or Remove Features. Check the box next to Visual Web Developer (also, make sure you [have] Visual C# and/or Visual Basic also installed) and click the Update button,” Dullard noted.

After the installation of the Visual Web Developer feature in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is complete, devs can go ahead and deploy the Silverlight 3 Tools with no problems. “This download will install the following: Silverlight 3 developer runtime; Silverlight 3 software development kit; KB967143 for Visual Studio 2008 SP1; and/or KB967144 for Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1; Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1; and/or Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1,” Microsoft added.

Microsoft Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 are available for download here.

Silverlight 3 RTW (3.0.40624.0) is available for download here.