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The new Setup tutorial takes full advantage of the Web Platform Installer (Web PI) which acts as a download and install tool for the needed Tools.  This makes writing the tutorial and installing much easier.

Along with the step by step guide, I’ve also updated the Getting Started series to reflect the new v4 tools and features, specifically CompositionTarget.Rendering (which is like ENTER_FRAME) and CompositeTransform (which makes transforms simpler than before).

Just like a hooker, your job is to entice the person before you to take faith in the hopeful reality that this will be an experience to remember (ok that analogy just took a nose dive in very bad way). Your job is to firstly convince the end user to install Silverlight should it not be in place and secondly and just as importantly your job is to convince the end user that sticking around is also equally important SHOULD they have the installation in place of Silverlight.

When I was in the Silverlight Product team, I had many visions of where I wanted to take the product beyond where some of my co-team mates were comfortable with (slow painful incremental growth in terms of change).

One of the main focal areas I wanted to fix, was the overall Installation and Preloading Experiences for Silverlight. In that, i think it’s essentially the like the IRAQ war of software (i.e. meaning, its so far embedded now that fixing it is going to take generations of change).

In this article Scott Barnes discusses how to control your Silverlight installation experience.

I’ve been doing plug-in development & design for many years, and often I’ve seen many a battle around this space. It typically starts with ubiquity, once that is overcome it then settles down at abandonment rates and from there the curse of the dreaded plug-in ends.

The reality however, no matter what plug-in you choose is that in actual fact ubiquity isn’t the sign of displeasure, it typically starts with how the entire package is presented to the end user.

In this post Tim Heuer explains how to act if you want to force your applications to be run out-of-browser. 

One thing that I’ve seen is folks asking for a method on how they can force the OOB mode in their app.  One of the security features of OOB is that the Install action must be user initiated.  This means it must be from the end-user action…not automated.  So you can’t just send a URL to someone and have it suddenly install the application OOB.  So how would you go about this?

James Bacon tries to explain how to detect what version of Silverlight is installed on a visitor's browser.

Basically the only documented way to answer this question is to repeatedly call isInstalled with different version numbers until you get the right version.

The Silverlight project templates in Visual Studio and other tools (such as Expression Blend) provide a default experience for users who do not have Silverlight installed. However, the current default experience is not very enticing.

This paper provides an insight into the mechanism of authoring and designing a proper installation experience for Silverlight applications on Web pages.  

The design incorporates feedback we got from focus groups and from our experience with many Web sites that have a sub-optimal installation experience for Silverlight.

The paper provides templates for Silverlight Web applications and Web media applications.

I’ve been promising this for a while and I’ve ranted about creating good installation experiences for Silverlight applications before as well here and here.  Well, our team rallied and created some new guidance and sample code to provide for you to implement the best possible experience.