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By the time Silverlight came around, the problems afflicting web applications all round were well known and somewhat well understood. The burden of dealing with network latency, cancellation and errors should not be thrust on every web developer. Platforms have a unique role in abstracting away these problems. However, beyond band-aid solutions, web platforms haven’t provided any effective remedies. With Silverlight we’ve tried to tackle these head on. I wouldn’t say we’ve solved them, but we’re a ways ahead than many others out there in recognizing and fixing issues in this space. Our strategy involves giving fish as well as fishing lessons. Silverlight enforces an asynchronous programming model for just about every latency, cancellation or conflict -afflicted scenario your web app would encounter. We further the mindset that much everything you’re trying to access can be on a remote machine or can take forever to return or can simply fail. This defensive posture is critical. And so whether Read More...
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DevDave (Dave Relyea) is a dev lead on the Silverlight team. He just blogged a really slick new animating wrap panel. Read about it here and try out the sample app below.
There are a bunch of different “interpolations” that you can choose from, including “back”, “elastic”, and “bounce.” I’ve updated my FlickrViewr to use this [...] Read More...
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Just a note to say I’ve updated my FlickrViewr for Silverlight Beta2. (All of the controls now use VisualStateManager, too!)
Enjoy! (See the original post for more info.) Read More...
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In Silverlight 2 Beta2, we’ve added significant new support for managing states and transitions inside of controls. To help explain the Parts & States Model, I’ve put together a 4 part post series that will show how to: Create a control contract using the Parts & States Model Wire the control logic to manipulate states & [...] Read More...
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Pages as a paradigm likely pre-date the web itself although they have been popularized by document-based markup languages deriving from SGML. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) with XAML further codifies Pages as a first-class UI element from its heretofore usage as a logical element. Looking back from Silverlight, this is as good a point in history to start as any. WPF has built-in support for reusable pages in its applications, and the task of navigation between them. It provides the infrastructure for declarative navigation via hyperlinks or programmatic navigation via NavigationService , and a journal that remembers which pages were navigated to or from. For XBAPs on IE7+, WPF supports integration of the journal with the browser's Back and Forward buttons, while elsewhere it displays a substitute navigation bar with this functionality (the limitation is an effect of how the XBAP host plugs into the browser). There is also a building block called PageFunction which introduces a paradigm Read More...
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Silverlight 2 application code is compiled to Common IL and packaged into assemblies (.dll) which are in turn deflated into a Zip file (container with .xap extension). The IL is a CPU- and platform- independent instruction set. The Silverlight runtime has in it the Core CLR which executes this IL. Given that .NET Framework involves much of the same things save for the .xap packaging, how does one tell between a DLL built for Silverlight versus one for .NET Framework? Well, the answer is in one of the security assumptions that Silverlight's Core CLR makes to distinguish a core platform assembly from a transparent code app assembly. The mscorlib.dll in Silverlight is signed with a different key than it's namesake in .NET Framework. This is apparent in it's full name, or specifically it's public key token. The public key token for mscorlib in Silverlight is: 7cec85d7bea7798e while the public key token for mscorlib in .NET Framework is: b77a5c561934e089 So the trick to sniffing out an arbitrary Read More...
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The second beta of Silverlight 2 has just been released. The team has been cranking away and there are some new features and lots of bug fixes to show. A big thanks to all who provided vital feedback on our previous pre-releases! Animation Support for animating custom data points Object Animation support (animating structs) Deep Zoom New XML-based file format MultiScaleTileSource to wire up your own images and get the Deep Zoom experience Better notifications when sub-images enter the view Controls Customize the look and feel of controls using Visual State Manager. Interactive control templates were never so easy. Some base controls are now part of the core platform, rather than packaged into apps. Say hello to smaller app sizes. Calendar now supports multi-selection and blackout dates New TabControl Control properties changes (Background, Tooltip, FontFamily, FontSize…) DataGrid improvements: auto size, reorder, sort, performance and more TextBox IME Level 3 input support Text wrapping Read More...
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Effective UI has put together a site called the User Interface Resource Center . They were kind enough to interview me about WPF, Silverlight, Expression and more. As they put it: In the 2008 whitepaper “The New Iteration,” Karsten Read More...
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A layout engine which does precise and optimal size or position calculations is critical in any user interface framework for building responsive, interactive and high-performance applications. The term "layout engine" is often interchangeably used with "rendering engine" to mean code that takes markup content along with styles, templates and other formatting instructions to display content on screen. As prominent examples, you know of Trident, the layout engine in Internet Explorer, or Gecko which performs a similar function in Netscape/Mozilla family browsers. In Silverlight, we typically look at the layout and rendering engines as two distinct things rather than one amorphous entity. The former handles the math which dictates how UI elements are sized and positioned on screen, and how they may be constrained or clipped in order to fit into the bounding box. The latter deals with the logic of taking bits representing graphical objects and showing them on screen. Lets do a quick lap around Read More...
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I've posted a few times about issues relating to enterprise distribution of Silverlight , and I thought I'd mention one additional topic that came up during a customer tour that I've been on for the last ten days. If you're a systems administrator, one of the aspects of Silverlight that concerns you is probably controlling the distribution of updates. In general, enterprises like to control their desktop and laptop environments to ensure no sudden surprises are caused (for example, by a runtime update that breaks a commonly used application). So some people may wish to dial down the update settings that are optimized for end-users when Silverlight is running in a corporate environment. Silverlight supports enterprise rollout via WSUS and we provide guidance on how to roll it out across an enterprise via other means such as Group Policy (using the EXE-based installer). Silverlight is installed via a normal MSI plus an MSP-based patch which can be chained through a variety of means. Updating Read More...
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We released a minor maintenance update to Silverlight 1.0 over the weekend (internally known as GDR3 , where GDR stands for "General Distribution Release"). I'm sure most readers of this blog already have Silverlight 2 Beta 1 installed on their own machines, but if you're building a site for the tens of millions of users that already have Silverlight installed on their machine, you'll be pleased to know that we're continuing to service the 1.0 release to take account of customer-reported issues. The latest release is live now on the web for both Mac and PC ; it reports itself as 1.0.30401.0 (where the build number indicates that it was compiled on April 1st). The changes are minor in nature and shouldn't affect existing applications; they include an audio bug fix for nForce 4 motherboards , an update to support custom parameters in ASX playlists , fixes to font support on Mac OS X Leopard and improved multi-language support during installation and update. As ever, the way to check Read More...
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Just loved the team's latest Silverlight video. Props to Adam, Laura, Nic, Monica, Dan, Scott and Tina. Read More...
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I uploaded three patches to Codeplex for Video.Show(): 1. Creating a dual server configuration to offload video processing 2. Running the Video Processing Service as an NT Service 3. Enabling anonymous uploading and commenting All three of these patches Read More...
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Following on very nicely from my last post on deploying Silverlight content to your own production server , I'm pleased to announce that Silverlight Streaming has added full support for Silverlight 2 applications. As well as adding the basic support, the team have put a lot of work into simplifying the process of uploading and validating your application. Here's a basic walkthrough: Create your Silverlight 2 application using Visual Studio or Expression Blend, do all the usual test / debug steps, etc. Create a manifest file named manifest.xml, that describes how you want the control to be hosted. Here's a simple sample you can use as a template: < SilverlightApp > < version > 2.0 </ version > < source > PopTheBubble.xap </ source > < width > 400 </ width > < height > 300 </ height > < background > white </ background > < isWindowless > false </ isWindowless > </ SilverlightApp > Zip your application .xap Read More...
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Deploying Silverlight content to a production web server is a pretty easy process. Despite occasional misconception, Silverlight doesn't require a Microsoft-based web server: Apache can host up Silverlight content just as happily as IIS. But there's one little gotcha: web servers are typically configured to only serve up a limited set of known file extensions as static content. That's all well and good, but Silverlight introduces two new file extensions (.xaml for loose XAML files and .xap for the zip-based binary packaging format). As a result, you need to add the MIME types for those file extensions to your web server so that it recognizes Silverlight content appropriately. Here are the MIME types you need to add to the server configuration: Extension MIME Type .xaml application/xaml+xml .xap application/x-silverlight-app That's all you have to do. Unfortunately, it's not possible to provide generic instructions for how to add MIME types, as it varies from server to server, but here are Read More...
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