Installing the MVVM Light Toolkit

Jump to: Prerequisites / Cleaning up / Installing / Credit / License / Feedback

New: MVVM Light Toolkit V4 beta1

Scroll down to install! See the change log

For more information about the toolkit in general, please refer to the Get Started page.

Latest and greatest: MVVM Light Toolkit V4 beta 1 for Silverlight 5 on Codeplex.

See how to download and build this code.

Adding MVVM Light to an existing project

If you want to add MVVM Light to an existing project, you should rather use the NuGet package manager to download and add MVVM Light!

Getting the source code

If you are so enclined, you can get the source code for MVVM Light. This is completely optional. MVVM Light is an open source project distributed under the MIT License. For more information, please refer to the Codeplex site for the MVVM Light project.

Prerequisites for installation

For Windows Presentation Foundation 4, you need to install
- For development: Visual Studio 2010
- To run the applications: .NET 4 (automatically installed when you install Visual Studio 2010).
- (strongly recommended) Expression Blend 4 to design the application.
For Silverlight 4, you need to install
- For development: Visual Studio 2010
- For development: Silverlight 4 tools 2010
- To run the applications: Silverlight 4 Runtime (automatically installed when you install the Silverlight tools for Visual Studio).
- (strongly recommended) Expression Blend 4 to design the application.

For Windows Phone 7.0, you need to install
- (optional) For development: Visual Studio 2010
- (optional) Expression Blend 4 to design the application.
- Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.0
- Note: If you don't install Visual Studio 2010 and/or Expression Blend, the Windows Phone developer tools install a free version of these tools for you, for free.

For Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango", you need to install
- (optional) For development: Visual Studio 2010
- (optional) Expression Blend 4 to design the application.
- Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Beta 2
- Note: If you don't install Visual Studio 2010 and/or Expression Blend, the Windows Phone developer tools install a free version of these tools for you, for free.

For Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5SP1, you need to install
- For development: Visual Studio 2008 and the Service Pack 1
- To run the applications: .NET 3.5 SP1 (automatically installed when you install Visual Studio 2008).
- (strongly recommended) Expression Blend 4 to design the application.
For Silverlight 3, you need to install
- For development: Visual Studio 2008 and the Service Pack 1
- For development: Silverlight tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
- To run the applications: Silverlight 3 (automatically installed when you install the Silverlight tools for Visual Studio).
- (strongly recommended) Expression Blend 4 to design the application.

Cleaning up before installation

MVVM light is fairly "old"; "historically", files were installed in various locations. In order to avoid issues, if you know that older versions of MVVM Light were installed manually, we recommend cleaning up the old files. To make this easier, you can download a cleanup application and follow the instructions on the "Cleaning" page.

Installation instructions

Uninstall previous versions of the MVVM Light Toolkit.
Download the installer:
- MVVM Light Toolkit V3
- MVVM Light Toolkit V4 beta 1 (change log)
Run the MSI file you just downloaded and follow the instructions.

Note: The “Updating Templates” step can take a few minutes, especially if you have multiple versions of Visual Studio. This is normal. If you have a version of Visual Studio open, the new templates will only appear in the "New Project" dialog after you restart it.

Caveat: Expression Blend 3

At this point, Expression Blend 3 is not supported by the installer. Existing MVVM Light applications can be edited in Expression Blend 3. To create new MVVM Light applications, you can either upgrade to Expression Blend 4, or create the new MVVM Light application in Visual Studio and then open it in Expression Blend 3.

Credit

The installer was initiated by Morten Nielsen. Without him, this would have taken much, much longer. Thanks so much for the help and for the great ideas and discussions Morten!

Open Source License

The MVVM Light Toolkit is distributed under the MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Feedback

Should you encounter any issue with the installer or MVVM Light, please choose from the following:

For general questions around MVVM Light, please use StackOverflow with the mvvm-light tag for your question. StackOverflow is a community-driven question/answer site where people from the wonderful MVVM Light community are eager to help you!
For issues found in MVVM Light (bugs), please use the Issue Tracker in Codeplex.
For feature requests or discussions, you can use the Codeplex Discussions board.
Finally, should you have a request that does not fit with the above, feel free to send an email. However, please allow some time for a reply.

Thanks and Happy Coding!

Laurent