After learning Silverlight 3 was going to be launched on July 10 I got ready to install it on my dev machine. I went to the official website and was greeted with a you-have-an-older-version message. (You can see screens of the process in my blog here
Right below that there was a System Requirements link and after following it I saw a chart that did not show support for IE8 in Windows 7 (I forgot to take a screenshot). I quickly twittered (@hooligannes) the info and got replies from two people who didn’t have any problems, so I decided to dive in. Here’s what happened.
Failed Runtime Installation
A short while after pressing on the Click to Install button, I was shown a message that said that I could not install Silverlight without updating my development tools first. My guess is that users without a dev environment with Silverlight tools will not see this. I can’t validate though. It is too bad that a link to the dev tools is not provided in that screen. That could definitely be improved.
Silverlight Tools Installation
A few clicks later I was on the downloads page for the Silverlight 3 Tools For Visual Studio 2008 SP1
The installer informed that it would prepare the download, get the runtime, clean the installation, uninstall the Silverlight 2 Tools, update Visual Studio, install the SDK and then install the tools.
Naively, I did this install with IE open. I was still on the Silverlight home page, after pressing on the Click To Install button again I was surprised at the failure message. It said that I already had the runtime. Of course, closing the browser and reopening it did the trick and I could see the site with full Silverlight magic.