On opening my silver light application(Developed in VS-2010) in VS-2015, there are build issues due to missing of Silverlight v5.0 SDKs. Where can i get the SDKs for Silverlight v5.0 ?
Silverlight v5.0 SDKs
10.9k views Asked by Pardha At
2
There are 2 answers
0
On
No matter where you find the tooling, you have to migrate. Silverlight was discontinued in 2012 and reaches End-Of-Life in one year+1 week (October 12, 2021). It already reached End-Of-Support in January 2020. The reason you can't find Silverlight tools in VS 2015 and later is they were never released.
By now, SL 5 only runs on IE 10/11 on Windows 7. No other browser supports the plugins required for SL5 (or plugins in general)
The answer to this possibly duplicate question shows where to find the SL 5 Developer runtime and links to the SL Releases page which includes the last SL 5 download from January 2019.
You may be able to use them to keep your application alive for a while but you really have to start migrating.
Migration options
One option is to migrate to OpenSilver, an open-source implementation of Silverlight on WASM that doesn't require plugins. This means it can run on all modern browsers and OS..NET Rocks show 1698 discusses OpenSilver and how to migrate. This is perhaps the easiest option, requiring minimal rewrite but also not offering all the benefits of a modern platform.
Another option is to move to Blazor and specifically Blazor WASM. The APIs are very different from SL, instead of XAML you work with HTML, but that means you also get the latest browser features and Web technologies out of the box.
Finally, one could completely rewrite the application in a modern SPA JavaScript framework like React, Angular or Vue.
A sudden change?
Not at all. It wasn't even a sudden change back in 2012, when Microsoft announced they'd discontinue Silverlight. I had proposed Silverlight for a new project only a few months earlier, so I remember the embarrassment.
Disappearing SDK links? That's to be expected and may even be on purpose. EOL means the vendor has no obligation to keep anything online. Microsoft already explains in the EOL page that the runtime installer will be available only up to October 2021. There's no mention about the SDK, and in fact, removing the SDK download would be a great way to stop people from creating new Silverlight projects.
This didn't happen overnight either. Even in 2016 the SDK was still available. That's 4 years after SL was discontinued. Microsoft really did phase Silverlight's removal over 8 years.
It's not just that maintaining downloads and docs isn't free. Those downloads and docs have to be migrated or even rewritten each time the web site changes, and take storage and bandwidth.
More importantly, Silverlight creates a security burden. A product's vendor has to release security fixes for any vulnerabilities found throughout a product's lifetime.
Any company that wanted to keep working with Silverlight had ample time to download all the tooling before it was removed.
I think you can use web archive to get the old (official) download link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190126163602if_/http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/A/3/3A35179D-5C87-4D0A-91EB-BF5FEDC601A4/sdk/silverlight_sdk.exe
Source: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RamiAbughazaleh.SilverlightProjectSystem