I arrived at work this morning only to find that the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 plugin and some documentation was discovered and available for download.  A few hours later the SDK and documentation was available, then after the keynote at Mix that whole lot was officially released.  I couldn't wait to try it out when I got home.

Unfortunately, the install experience hasn't been good.  I've got the Silverlight 2.0 plugin and SDK installed, but I can't get the tools for Visual Studio 2008 installed.  Here's step by step what I've done so far.

1. Downloaded and installed the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 plugin (runtime) without a hitch.
2. Downloaded Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK, Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Tools for Visual Studio 2008, and Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview.
3. Uninstalled Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Tools for Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 December Preview.
4. Installed Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK.
5. Tried to install Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Tools for Visual Studio but got the following error message:

An Error Has Occurred:
Silverlight Tools cannot be installed because one or more of the following conditions is true:

1. Visual Studio 2008 RTM is not installed.
2. The Web Authoring feature of Visual Studio is not installed.
3. A previous version of the Silverlight Runtime is installed.
4. A previous version of the Silverlight SDK is installed.
5. The Visual Studio Update KB949325 is installed.
6. A previous version of Silverlight Tools is installed.

To continue, please install or uninstall the appropriate products and run this installer again.

6. Verified what I had installed.  I've got Visual Studio Team System 2008 RTM, Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component, Silverlight runtime, Silverlight 2 SDK, Silverlight 1.0 SDK.  Oops, maybe that's the problem?  Also, I didn't uninstall Silverlight 1.1 Alpha runtime before installing Silverlight 2.0 runtime, but that shouldn't be a problem.
7. Uninstalled Silverlight runtime and both SDKs, then rebooted for good measure.
8. Installed Silverlight runtime, 2.0 SDK, ran silverlight_chainer.exe again and got the same error.
9. Did a web search and found http://blog.steeleprice.net/archive/2008/03/05/1362.aspx which mentions a registry key that needs to be removed, but I don't have that registry key on my system.

At this point I can't find any more information through web searches or in the Silverlight.Net forums.  I'm posting this problem in the forums with a link here for a complete description of the problem.

I was really hoping to get few things done in Silverlight 2.0 and posted online tonight, but I'm kind of stuck and frustrated at this point.

UPDATE

Chad Campbell responded to my Silverlight.net forum post with a solution.  The solution definitely isn't something that I'd say is obvious, but hey, do whatever works.  I'm just a little surprised that I'd have more trouble with the beta than the alpha.

A big thanks goes out to Chad for his quick reply.  I'm definitely going to have to buy his book now!

Oops!

Even though the tools are now installed, something is still wrong.  Here's what I get when I try to create a Silverlight project in Visual Studio 2008.

Resolution

It turns out that the Silverlight 2 Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 installs the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 runtime and SDK as part of the package.  This causes a problem if you already installed the plugin or the SDK.  I uninstalled everything Silverlight related, then installed silverlight_chainer.exe, this time successfully.  I'm now ready to go.