Aug 24, 2010 08:12 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft is currently offering developers leveraging its alternative to Adobe Flash the same documentation for the last couple of Silverlight releases.

According to the Redmond company, the fact that the resources for Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 3 are essentially the same is due to the fact that the two releases of the technology share many common characteristics.

Fact is that at least for the time being, developers should not expect the software giant to separate the documentation for the latest iteration of Silverlight from that of its predecessor.

“There is quite a bit of overlap between developing for Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4 and so in order to not duplicate content in different locations on the web, both versions are covered in the same set of MSDN documentation,” revealed a member of the Silverlight team.

At the same time, Microsoft is offering developers the necessary resources to help them target Silverlight 4, released earlier this year.

Ensuring That Your Silverlight Applications Work with Silverlight 4 for example, is designed to deliver an insight into the changes introduced between Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4.

Still, there are additional resources offered by the Redmond company, as noted by the Silverlight team member:

“•You can see what versions of Silverlight an API is supported in by scrolling down to the Version Information section of the API document.

•For API supported in both versions of Silverlight, version differences (if any), are called out in version information notes in the remarks section of the API document.

•Version notes are also available in overviews, tutorials, etc. In a few cases, there are separate versions of the same document (e.g. Digital Rights Management (DRM), versus Digital Rights Management (Silverlight 3)).

This is done when version behavior for a given scenario or feature differs too much for version notes to cover in a single document.”

Microsoft released the latest version of Silverlight in April 2010. Developers leveraging the technology in addition to additional developer releases from Microsoft, might remember that just days earlier the company had also offered the latest iterations of Visual Studio and .NET Framework.

At the bottom of this screen you will be able to find download links for the latest update to Silverlight 4 RTW, along with the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. The software development kit (SDK) for Silverlight 4 continues to be in Beta at this point in time.

Silverlight 4 Build 4.0.50524.0 RTW is available for download here.

Microsoft Silverlight SDK 4.0.41108.0 Beta is available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download
here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download
here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download
here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download
here.

.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.