This one is for anyone who has had to deal with Company Standard Operating Environments (SOE’s), and the red tape involved with deploying updates to applications such as Silverlight.

We have been working on a Silverlight 4 application, and along the way our development environment had its Silverlight Tools and Runtime updated to a more recent version than what the SOE machines are currently running. When we went to test the deployment, of course nothing worked.

“Ok that’s cool” we said, “we’ll just install the previous versions of the Developer Runtime, SDK and Tools”.

After a few frantic minutes of searching through hard drives, and our development installation area (where it SHOULD have been), we discovered that we didn’t have a copy of what we needed.

“Ok that’s also cool” we naively said, “we’ll just download them from Microsoft”.

Have you ever tried to search for the download anything other than the current version of an application from download.microsoft.com? We discovered today what a nightmare it can really be!

A good while later, after of trawling through blog posts and comments about how to downgrade and where to download, we finally found the following three working links for what we need to compile for Silverlight 4.0.50524.0.

Silverlight 4 Developer Runtime v4.0.50524.0:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/5/8/C5877489-8022-42A6-8456-D05C2A6C8DFB/runtime/Silverlight_Developer.exe

Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (SDK v4.0.50401.0) – (compatible with v4.0.50524.0):
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/B/4/5B46BF8A-9350-49D5-B1E7-7789818FBF41/Silverlight4_Tools.exe

And the runtime version installed in the SOE (just in case you want to test your application before trying to deploy):

Silverlight 4 Runtime 4.0.50524.0:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/5/8/C5877489-8022-42A6-8456-D05C2A6C8DFB/runtime/Silverlight.exe

Here are the links to information that helped us find it all.

1) Developer Runtime was found here: Silverlight Release History http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=1B7A3205-B5F8-4E20-BF42-792DE5923454&displaylang=en

We then changed the link for the version we found from Silverlight_Developer.exe to Silverlight.exe to get the standard runtime release without debug information.

2) A post from Tim Heuer showed us that there was no updated Tools/SDK so the original final release of the SDK (v4.0.50401.0) would work fine http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/06/03/silverlight-4-minor-update-june-2010.aspx. The link to the original Tools was then found in a blog comment somewhere – sorry I can’t remember where it is, and can’t see it in amongst the 20 odd Chrome windows + tabs open .

Time Heuer’s blog also had some helpful information on downgrading your Silverlight installation (e.g. uninstall the current SDK, reinstall the one you want and away you go).

I hope this saves someone a few minutes of their time!