Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

You get all this honking and hoopla and what not, but nobody seems to think about the big Silverlight 4 Question: Can I install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, Silverlight 4 Tools, WCF RIA Services, The November 2009 SIlverlight Toolkit, and Blend 4 Trial on the same machine that I have Visual Studio 2008, Siverlight 3, SIlverlight 3 Toolkit, Blend 3 and so on – and will they co-exist peacefully on the same machine? Answer: Yes! All you may need to do is uninstall your previous RIA Services Preview. Everything else will “just work”. I just did it and tested it all out. Bart Czernicki mentions an issue that you can review here . Disclaimer: No animals were harmed in the creation of the UnBlog post. Your mileage may vary. Oh, and one final note: If you are going to install WCF RIA Services with Visual Studio 2010, you will no longer be able to use RIA services with Visual Studio 2008. They don't install "side -by-side".

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. --Einstein How many times, as a developer, have you found yourself mindlessly and stubbornly trying to solve a problem (some thrown exception, for example) for an hour, two hours, or even longer, without a solution? This is like the Einstein quote above: madness! What you need to do is get Another Set of Eyes to sit by you while you work your way through the issue. It doesn't even have to be a developer who is very familiar with the codebase you're working on -- the mere act of "changing the paradigm" will enable you to look at the problem more objectively and find the answer quickly. In a team environment, we have a general rule that if you're stuck on a problem for more than 20 or 30 minutes, you put your ego in your back pocket and ask another developer to come sit by you while you demonstrate the issue. Recently another developer I work with asked me over. He admitted having so...