Silverlight game design: Upgrading examples from earlier versions

After talking with Dan Waters, I realized that I hadn’t written anything for Silverlightgames lately. I have been reviewing some thinking processes that students use when they are exploring new ideas (and when I say student I mean hobbyists as well as professors, who are usually in learning modes). So I did a Bing search for Silverlight games and found quite a few, but most were using a number of older versions of Silverlight. 

First of all, if you are using an older version of Silverlight, there may be no easy way for you to upgrade the Visual Studio Solution. The quickest approach would be to create a new project with the same name as the project you are upgrading using the Silverlight Template. Change the name of the default projects, there are two, don’t delete them yet.

Now add all of the project files from the older version, these are files with csproj as an extension. There will be a conversion wizard, go ahead and work through it for each project.

Now delete the renamed default project. In many cases this will get you going with Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4 projects generated in Visual Studio 2008. For older versions, I am still trying to figure a quick way to upgrade and we need that since those are were the interesting tutorials are located.

One of the applications that I used is one written by Yasser Azeem, you can find it at:

https://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/Silverlight_Breakout.aspx

This is a well documented article and once you have upgraded the project to Visual Studio 2010, make sure to follow the well written article by Yasser!