Cannot install silverlight 4 tools on visual studio 2010 sp1

Question

I\'ve installed Visual Studio 2010 (fresh install), then applied the SP1. Now I\'ve tried to install the silverlight 4 tools, but i\'m getting a strange error message :

Answer 1

**Maybe a tip for some of us. Install or repair MSXML6. We were struggling getting the SL4 projects loaded in VS2010 SP1. Uninstalled all SL4 components... reinstalled SP1... recovered VS2010... and all other combinations, nothing worked. Installing the MSXML6 solved our issue.**

Along these lines, I found that the combination of Visual Studio 2010 with SP1, and Silverlight 4 in either Vista or Windows 7 does not coexist well with the latest (December 2012) Silverlight 5 browser plug ins. The "solution"--at least for me it works--is to remove Silverlight 5 from your system as a browser client plug in, then install the SL Developer package that comes up when you try and create a new SL project and things are missing. This will work to allow you to develop in SL 3/4 and .NET 4.0, but now you're missing the SL browser plug in so you cannot surf the net and visit SL sites [UPDATE: it's mysteriously back, so indeed I can surf the net]. A minor setback since I develop in a virtual OS and go back and forth to the real OS, where I have SL in the browser but don't develop there. A bug perhaps, though I also don't have all the Microsoft Updates either... This is what happens when a framework stops getting supported?

Answer 2

Thought I propose a bit more detail about installing FSharpRuntimeSL4.msi manually... for myself this alone did not fix the issue. I needed the Silverlight 4 Toolkit 9April 2010)

First if you had the SilverLight 5 runtime at some point you will have to remove it.

Then extract the Silverlight4_Tools 4 files as proposed above. I had to run everything to finally get an old solution to compile properly:

1. FSharpRuntimeSL4.msi
2. SilverlightTools_Package.msi
3. silverlight_developer.exe
4. RiaServices.msi
5. VS10-KB982218-v4.exe

After that I was able to install the April update.

Answer 3

If you are trying to install the Lync SDK it will not recognise SP1 as a valid alternative for the Silverlight 4 tools. In this instance you will need to uninstall SP1, install the Silverlight 4 Tools and the Lync SDK before installing SP1 again.

Answer 4

According to Microsoft you shouldn't need to install it but unfortunately it does contain some components that are not included in Visual Studio 2010 SP1. In order to work around this you can extract the Silverlight 4 tools installer with 7zip and then install the missing components (notably FSharpRuntimeSL4.msi) manually.

Answer 5

Found out what happened

I installed first Visual Studio, and removed some components that I thought wouldn’t be necessary (c++, f#, etc). I also removed visual web developer tools (shouldn’t have done that… you’ll see why in a minute).
After that, I installed Service Pack 1. Then, when trying to install the Silverlight 4 tools, I got an strange error message and I couldn’t continue. After searching the web, I found out that the SP1 for VS2010 comes with the Silverlight 4 tools bundled, and it should be installed by it.
The problem comes here : since I didn’t have my VS installation with the web developer tools installed, the SP1 installer just disregarded the Silverlight tools installation. And since Microsoft’s Silverlight 4 toolkit installer is buggy (if you have SP1 for VS2010 you just get this weird error and can’t continue), I was stuck.
How did I solve it? Add web developer tools to VS2010, and reapply SP1. It’s a much faster solution than uninstalling SP1, installing Silverlight 4 tools and reinstalling SP1. Let’s hope that Microsoft grows aware of this situation, and upgrades their Silverlight tools installer to be a little more clever in the future so we don’t have to be doing these workarounds