Development tools
Silverlight applications can be written in any .NET programming language. As such, any development tools which can be used with .NET languages can work with Silverlight, provided they can target the Silverlight CoreCLR for hosting the application, instead of the .NET Framework CLR. Microsoft has positioned Microsoft Expression Blend versions 2.0 and 2.5 for designing the UI of Silverlight 1.0 and 2 applications respectively. Visual Studio 2008 can be used to develop and debug Silverlight applications. To create Silverlight projects and let the compiler target CoreCLR, Visual Studio 2008 requires the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio which is available as a beta release.
A Silverlight project contains the Silverlight.js and CreateSilverlight.js files which initializes the Silverlight plugin for use in HTML pages, a XAML file for the UI, and code-behind files for the application code. Silverlight applications are debugged in a manner similar to ASP.NET applications. Visual Studio's CLR Remote Cross Platform Debugging feature can be used to debug Silverlight applications running on a different platform as well.