Silverlight 4 was released back in April without essential development tools.Recently it was announced that Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is ready. In addition to basic Silverlight 4 support and templates for RIA Services, there are many IDE enhancements to make working with Silverlight, WPF, and XAML easier.
With Silverlight 3 working with OOB apps can be quite frustrating. With Silverlight Tools installed, the IDE now supports directly launching and debugging Silverlight out-of-browser applications.
To make templating data-bound controls easier, you can now provide sample data that the controls will respond to at design time.
On the styling side three new features will be welcomed by both Silverlight and WPF users. To make templating data-bound controls easier, you can now provide sample data that the controls will respond to at design time. When chasing down why a style is set a particular way, you can use the “Go to Value Definition” command from the properties window. And once there the new Intellisense support for styles will make changing it easier.
You can read more about it on Mark Wilson-Thomas’s blog post or get it for yourself on the Silverlight site. Just make sure you uninstall any pre-release versions first.