I installed the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 tools while I was watching the MIX Keynote live online last week.

(You can watch the keynote and all of the sessions, by the way by going to www.visitmix.com!)

I was eager to see what the integrated tooling in VS2008 looked like. Here it is.

But when I tried to drag a control onto the surface nothing happened. I could drag it into the XAML and it would appear on the surface, so that was something.

Once it was there, I tried to move or resize the control in the designer, but I couldn't even select it.

I got frustrated and was too embarrassed to ask anyone and went back to all of other deadlines I was juggling.

Tonight I thought I would go try again... same results.

So I started poking around the Silverlight.net website and finally found this statement in a tutorial on Silverlight User Interface Controls by Jesse Liberty

At the time of this writing, for example, just before we release Beta 1 of Silverlight 2, the design surface in Visual Studio will reflect changes made in the markup (XAML) but you can not yet drag and drop controls onto the design surface (though you can drag and drop controls into the markup and see the effect immediately in the design window).

Okay, now I don't feel like such a dope after all.