Developers looking to start building code with the next generation of Silverlight and Visual Studio can leverage a free download offered by Microsoft, bridging the two products. Essentially, the Redmond company is offering an add-on for the second beta development milestone of Visual Studio 2010 that, along with the prerequisite files, will allow devs to build Silverlight 4 and RIA Services applications. Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is up for grabs via the Microsoft Download Center.

“This package is an add-on for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 4 and RIA Services. It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Beta 2. It extends existing Silveright 3 features and multitargeting capabilities in Visual Studio 2010 to also create applications for Silverlight 4 using C# or Visual Basic,” Microsoft informed.

The software giant has made it clear that the latest iteration of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 only works with the Beta 2 release of the development platform, and not with the Beta 1 milestone. At the same time, developers should expect Microsoft to deliver an updated version of the Silverlight 4 Tools once it will offer early adopters Visual St… (read more)