Silverlight 5 Beta Tools and SDK Released

At MIX11, Microsoft releases the first Beta of Silverlight 5, but also a collection of tools and resources designed to enable developers to start building projects leveraging the new technology. I’ve already told Softpedia readers that they can download and install the Silverlight 5 Beta Developer Runtime for Windows or Silverlight 5 Beta Developer Runtime for Mac, depending on the platform they’re running.

But at the same time, there are additional downloads offered by the software giant.

Developers using Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 will be able to get Silverlight 5 Beta Tools for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 from the Microsoft Download Center.

“This package is an add-on for Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 5 Beta and Microsoft WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP2 Preview (April 2011). It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Service Pack 1,” Microsoft reveals.

“It extends existing Silverlight 4 features and multitargeting capabilities in Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 to also create applications for Silverlight 5 Beta using C# or Visual Basic.”

At the same time, the Redmond company made available for download the Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5.

Obviously, the Preview can be put to good use to create Silverlight 5 and Silverlight 5 SketchFlow projects with Expression Blend.

With each new version of Silverlight, the software giant also provides devs with an accompanying software development kit, and v5 is no exception.

Silverlight 5 Beta comes with its very own Silverlight 5 Beta SDK, as well as the WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 5 Beta, resources designed to make it easier for developers to build Silverlight 5 projects.

Microsoft is currently hard at work to finalize and release Silverlight 5 to web by the end of 2011.

Silverlight 5 Beta Developer Runtime for Windows is available for download here.

Silverlight 5 Beta Developer Runtime for Mac is available for download here.