Cannot install silverlight 4 tools on visual studio 2010 sp1

Question

I've installed Visual Studio 2010 (fresh install), then applied the SP1. Now I've tried to install the silverlight 4 tools, but i'm getting a strange error message :

"Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 or Visual Phone Developer Express 2010 that matches the language version of Silverlight Tools 4 must be installed before installation of Silverlight Tools can continue. Silverlight Tools is available in other languages at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=177432.

The Visual Web Developer feature for Visual Studio 2010 must be installed before installation can continue."

I've triple checked and there's no language conflict. Browsing the web, some guys have the same error, but there are some MSDN posts that say that with SP1 you don't need to install silverlight tools because they're already bundled with SP1, but that's not the case here, I don't have any project templates in VS for silverlight, and the tools aren't installed. Any ideas??

Answer 1

Found out what happened

I installed first Visual Studio, and removed some components that I thought wouldn’t be necessary (c++, f#, etc). I also removed visual web developer tools (shouldn’t have done that… you’ll see why in a minute).
After that, I installed Service Pack 1. Then, when trying to install the Silverlight 4 tools, I got an strange error message and I couldn’t continue. After searching the web, I found out that the SP1 for VS2010 comes with the Silverlight 4 tools bundled, and it should be installed by it.
The problem comes here : since I didn’t have my VS installation with the web developer tools installed, the SP1 installer just disregarded the Silverlight tools installation. And since Microsoft’s Silverlight 4 toolkit installer is buggy (if you have SP1 for VS2010 you just get this weird error and can’t continue), I was stuck.
How did I solve it? Add web developer tools to VS2010, and reapply SP1. It’s a much faster solution than uninstalling SP1, installing Silverlight 4 tools and reinstalling SP1. Let’s hope that Microsoft grows aware of this situation, and upgrades their Silverlight tools installer to be a little more clever in the future so we don’t have to be doing these workarounds

Answer 2

According to Microsoft you shouldn't need to install it but unfortunately it does contain some components that are not included in Visual Studio 2010 SP1. In order to work around this you can extract the Silverlight 4 tools installer with 7zip and then install the missing components (notably FSharpRuntimeSL4.msi) manually.

Answer 3

The VS 2010 Service Pack 1 has SilverLight Toolkit install as default. You don't need to install the SilverLight tool anymore.