Microsoft released Silverlight 4 dev. tools

Microsoft made available on Monday Sliverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010, an add-on package for the Visual Studio 2010 IDE providing tooling for the Sliverlight 4 rich Internet plugin-in platform.

Functioning with either the newly released Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer Express tools, Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio supports capabilities such as Silverlight 4's elevated trust and out-of-browser application functions.

Other Silverlight 4 capabilities supported include Style Intellisense, for modifying XAML styles; Data Source Selector, for modifying data source information; and Go To Value Definition, for navigating directly from controls on a page to styles applied to them.

"Please note: many of the new designer features work well with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) as well as Silverlight projects, so this download is definitely recommended for Visual Studio 2010 WPF designer users too," the Visual Studio WPF and Silverlight Designer Team said in a blog post on Monday.

Silverlight is Microsoft's entrant into the rich Internet application space, alongside rivals such as Adobe Systems Flash. But the HTML5 specification has been emerging as a potential rival and eventual replacement for single-vendor technologies such as Flash and Silverlight. Silverlight 4 was released last month.

Siverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 can be downloaded at Microsoft's Web site.