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 :

"Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 or Visual Phone Developer Express 2010 that matches the language version of Silverlight Tools 4 must be installed before installation of Silverlight Tools can continue. Silverlight Tools is available in other languages at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=177432.

The Visual Web Developer feature for Visual Studio 2010 must be installed before installation can continue."

I've triple checked and there's no language conflict. Browsing the web, some guys have the same error, but there are some MSDN posts that say that with SP1 you don't need to install silverlight tools because they're already bundled with SP1, but that's not the case here, I don't have any project templates in VS for silverlight, and the tools aren't installed. Any ideas??

Solution 1

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

Solution 2

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.

Solution 3

The VS 2010 Service Pack 1 has SilverLight Toolkit install as default. You don't need to install the SilverLight tool anymore.

Solution 4

I got tired of many threads discussing that and no real solution, at least o pass through the error complaining the VS2010 version/language.

I downloaded the Silverlight4_tools.exe, and started from command line passing the option /X

SilverLight4_Tools.EXE /X

It will ask me a place to extract the files. I set a dir, and from there I run:

silverlight_sdk.msi
RiaServices.msi

After that I could able to remove the old

using System.Web.Ria;
using System.Web.Ria.ApplicationServices;

and replace them with

using System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting;
using System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Server.ApplicationServices;

Solution 5

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.

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Comments

[Mark Heath]

Yes, I was getting this error with VS2010 SP1 installed. However, I did still need to install Silverlight_Developer.exe to get things working

[MattSlay]

"Silverlight Toolkit" is different that "Silverlight Tools".

[MJ Hufford]

I had to install the Silverlight_Developer as well (even after SP1).

[Greg]

I have been through the same mission and I thought I had the latest of everything. However, I started noticing XAML properties missing. As an example, can anyone tell me if they have the TargetNullValue available on a textblock in XAML. Thanks

[Francesco De Vittori]

Thanks, you saved my day. I got the same problem, so I downloaded the Silverlight 4 tools for VS 2010, extracted silverlight4_tools.exe with winrar and installed FSharpRuntimeSL4.msi.

[darkstar3d]

I had to do that, it really sucks!

[Peter Walke]

You can also ignore the warning. The Lync SDK works just fine if you ignore the warning.

[Brent Lamborn]

Can you elaborate on what " Add web developer tools to VS2010" means? I am not familiar with exactly what this is. Do you have a link to a download?

[Dippi]

It's not only a much faster solution, but uninstalling SP1 and installing Silverlight 4 could often fail in the last phase, giving you strange errors while trying to reinstalling SP1, as I just experimented now (ignoring the messagebox on SP1 uninstallation which was warning me like "Uninstalling SP1 can prevent the system from reinstalling it", I thought "WHAT?! Yes yes, nice try" while clicking "OK", and now I'm finishing a total reinstallation of VS2010 from scratch...)

[BOORO]

I ended up using the /X trick to Silverlight_Developer.exe so that I could install silverlightdev.msp.. AWFUL that I could get VS2010 into a state like this.

[Dan Doyon]

It is not necessary to use 7zip, when you get error just click browse button, you will see FSharpRuntimeSL4.msi. Select it and click OK.

[hal9000]

this one did it for me with one difference... I was able to run FSharpRuntimeSL4 but then I had to remove the silverlight 5 runtime before I could install the silverlight_developer for 4.

[Tom Brown]

This worked for me: Open silverlight4_tools.exe in WinRar (as an archive): run silverlightTools_Package.msi, then silverlight_sdk.msi, then RiaServices.msi - I can now create Silverlight apps in Visual Studio. Note I didn't run the FSharp or VS10-KB components.

[Jason Rowe]

Just think, the app probably could have been written in HTML5 by now.

[Coops]

Has there been an official announcement that SL is no longer to be supported?

[Richard Williams]

This helped me diagnose a different but related problem where I unwittingly had the Silverlight 4 runtime, rather than the Silverlight 4 Developer runtime. Helpfully they both appear identical in the "Features and Programs" window - apart from the disk space they use!

[Guido Neele]

Thank you, this solved my problem that I spent hours on to solve. Installed all Silverlight runtimes, sdk's, tools, toolkits you name it, it all didn't work. Installing MSXML6 solved my problem.

[Davut Gürbüz]

It worked like a charm! For my big ria-services business project without changing a line.

[Avrohom Yisroel]

I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to add my thanks to Richard Williams for the comment. I had been banging my head against the screen over this. I uninstalled the Silverlight item, then installed the developer runtime, and it now works! Thanks.

[incognito]

For those who need to fix a bug in a legacy system and messed up dev environment, this is a correct way to get rid of LS5 components (that can be accidentally installed as being latest) and reinstall SL4 missing parts. Should be marked as correct answer.

[sabertooth1990]

@JasonRowe In my case I had to debug and support for legacy Silverlight application.