As you probably know already, Silverlight 3 RTW has been released. Download the tools for Visual Studio here:
I made the mistake of uninstalling RIA Services before installing the Silverlight 3 RTW Tools thinking it would be a part of the installer (which it wasn’t). Silverlight 3 RTW has a new project template called Silverlight Business Application that relies on RIA Services, and doesn’t appear in Visual Studio as a project template unless RIA Services is installed. When I found it wasn’t installed I tried to install it again the installer told me it needed the Silverlight 3 Beta SDK to be installed in order to continue! Brad Abrams from Microsoft let me know that there would be an update to the RIA Services installer soon, but in the meantime I came up with a hack to the installer to get it to install. Download Orca, a .msi editor from here:
http://www.technipages.com/download-orca-msi-editor.html
After installing it, right click on the RiaServices.msi file and select Edit with Orca. Select the InstallExecuteSequence table, and change the DependencyCheck action to Installed (instead of NOT Installed). Then select the InstallUISequence table and make the same change to its DependencyCheck action. Save the file, and try to install it again and it should install! It’s a hack, and should be fixed soon, but in the meantime if you’ve uninstalled RIA Services like I did or you’re just getting started with Silverlight this should get you going.
Update: No sooner than I blog this then I’m told that the July Preview of RIA Services has been released. So much for my impatience :). Get it here:
One more note, unfortunately the ComboBox control still doesn’t have the SelectedValuePath and SelectedValue properties for databinding in foreign key scenarios – a pet peeve of mine. Tim Heuer from Microsoft said when I asked him that they have it down on their list but it didn’t make it this time unfortunately.
Chris Anderson 