As we approach the launch of Silverlight 4 and today the 2010 Winter Olympics begin (which are streaming via Silverlight!) I thought I’d post about some Silverlight Tools you may find useful as you build Silverlight applications. Some of these are also good WPF or general XAML tools. I haven’t used all of these personally – some are on the list because people I respect have vouched for them. If you have favorites of your own, please let me and other readers know via the comments.

The Silverlight Basics

You can Get Started with Silverlight by following the steps on the Silverlight site. The Web Platform Installermakes it easy to get the SDK, developer runtimes, and Visual Studio project templates.

Next you’ll want to installExpression Blend and Sketchflow (trial links).

More Microsoft Silverlight Tools

• Deep Zoom Composer– Deep Zoom is a technology that allows you to view extremly high resolution images in your Silverlight application, and allow the user to smoothly zoom in and out of such images. Learn more about Deep Zoom.
• Silverlight Toolkit– The Silverlight Toolkit includes controls, components, and utilities for Silverlight with full source code, tests, and samples.

Third Party Silverlight Tools

• Silverlight Spy– An indispensable tool for Silverlight development, allowing you to examine the UI element source, monitor events, extract XAML, view statistics, and more.
• Reflector– Still a great tool for Silverlight/WPF development, just as it is for general .NET dev.
• Fiddler/FireBug– Both of these tools allow you to see what’s being sent and received over the wire, which is extremely handy when you need to be sure the problem you’re debugging isn’t in your network messaging.
• Snoop for Silverlight– Learn morehere. Sourcehere. I’m not sure if there is a more recent version of the tool – if you know of one please comment.
• Kaxaml– Lightweight XAML editor.
• Rooler– A nice tool for inspecting and extracting dimensions and bounds of graphic elements. Need to know how many pixels a button is so you can use the value in your Silverlight style? Rooler makes this easy.
• XAML Power Toys– By Karl Shifflett. From the site: “XAML Power Toys is a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Add-In that empowers WPF & Silverlight developers while working in the XAML editor. Its Line of Business form generation tools, Grid tools, DataForm, DataGrid and ListView generation really shorten the XAML page layout time.”
• Open Source Silverlight Tools– You’ll find a bunch of open source Silverlight controls and frameworks on CodePlex.

Silverlight News

Here are a few well-known sources of Silverlight news – obviously your search engine of choice tends to work well for this as well.

• Silverlight Feeds– Community moderated Silverlight content from bloggers. Add feeds for your favorite Silverlight bloggers to the site and their posts will be included. Great signal to noise ratio for Silverlight content.
• Silverlight Cream– A Silverlight resource site that aggregates content from many other sites, and has some original material as well.
• The Official Silverlight Site– Of course…

If you’re not reading this at its permanent location, come back to Silverlight Tools to read the latest post and see any updates that have been added since it was aggregated.