The good news is that many of these tools are free so you can try out the technology and build applications based on Silverlight and Deep Zoom without having to spend a penny. In this post I’ll give a brief description of the different tools as well as options for free versions and trial versions.
Building Silverlight Applications
Creating Silverlight applications is possible without an IDE but I wouldn’t recommend it when you can get Visual Studio Express for free. Visual Studio provides you with a complete environment for creating, building and testing Silverlight and many other types of applications. Visual Studio 2010 supports Silverlight 3 out of the box. It also supports Silverlight 4 with an additional download.
Free: Visual Web Developer 2010 Express
A free trial version of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is also available (Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate has many more features than VS2010 Express)
Creating Deep Zoom Compositions
Free: Deep Zoom Composer
