Could Silverlight [1] 1.1 assemblies be generated with Visual Studio .NET 2005? Well, if you read the GetStarted [2] page of Silverlight you see only upcoming Visual Studio codename Orcas as development platform.
Bryant asked this in the Silverlight forum and got a great answer from Scott Louvau [3]. He replied:
Well, in VS2005 you can create a class library which will build against the Silverlight runtime, but it's a little work.
<li>Create a Class Library. <li>Remove all references from it. <li>Right-click on the Project and pick Properties. <li>On the Build tab, click Advanced and check 'Do not reference mscorlib.dll' <li>Manually add references to mscorlib, agclr, System, System.Core, System.Silverlight, and System.Xml.Core from the Silverlight install folder (\Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\) </li> At this point your build outputs should be Silverlight consumable binaries. It looks like the equivalent command line call to csc.exe (the C# compiler) should include the references to the mentioned binaries and the /nostdlib option but may require others as well.
You will find an Hello World example on Bryant's blog here [4]. Feel free to download it and try it with Visual Studio .NET 2005. Don't forget to first install Silverlight 1.1.
Do you want to try it with Notepad? Read my blog how to compile it without any Visual Studio .NET installed [5].