Chat Tutorial - Part 1: Creating the Project

Okay, this is probably a little out of scope but I wanted to cover everything from the ground up. I will be assuming that you have Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4 Tools installed and that you are somewhat familiar with C# and fundemental Silverlight programming.

First, open Visual Studio 2010 and select "New Project..." from the start page. Select "Visual C# - Silverlight" under the "Installed Templates", select "Silverlight Application" and enter "Chat" for a project name. Click "OK" to continue.

Accept the defaults in the "New Silverlight Application" and click "OK" to create the project. I don't necessarily care for the default project naming but it is useful to look at what is generated. I will be trying to use defaults where possible throughout the tutorial.

We now have a default solution containing two projects. The "Chat" project is where we will be developing the Silverlight chat client and the "Chat.Web" project will contain the WCF chat service.

In the next part of the tutorial, I will do some housekeeping on the project files and get everything set up for releasing the project under the GNU Affero General Public License.