Silverlight Blog

I read very often things like “Should work, cause its downward compatible”. But I’m too long in the business to trust sentences like this – so basically If I write a Silverlight 3 App for a customer I want to test it with the SL 3 Runtime, if I play around with the new SL 4 Features, I obviously need SL 4 Runtime. Are you like me ? Don’t you like VMs for these small requirements ?

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Many of you will know, that Silverlight 3 has a new class called WritableBitmap. We can now create Bitmaps on-the-fly.  At the moment one interest of mine is Silverlight Game-programming and I thought, this class may also help to build pixel based Collision-Detection.

Guess what, I found an article from Andy Beaulieu doing exactly that:

" Improved HitTest Method for Silverlight 3" from Andy Beaulieu

Good afternoon,

one of my expectations as a Software Developer in 2010 is, that the WCF RIA Services for Silverlight will become a huge  thing. So I did some research, and found a nice webcast by Ronnie Sauermann from Microsoft Switzerland. I met him during a project I did last summer, and he has a very good way to explain things. check it out! I unfortunately found no way to directly bookmark the video. So click the link and navigate down to Ronnies Video about RIA Services.

Video from Shapes ‘09 about WCF RIA Services

There is a new Kid in SL-IDE-Town, and its called Eclipse4SL. To be honest, it isn’t really new, cause development started in 2008. But end of  2009 they released Version 1.0.

The Features of this Version are:

• Silverlight 2.0 support
• C# code editor with syntax colorization, keywords and template code completion assist
• Automatic Build & Run
• Configurable Web application launch facilities
• Silverlight Project System and Silverlight Compiler: both an advanced project system for creating Silverlight applications and media experiences.
• XAML Editor & Preview: advanced, standards-compliant XAML editor with code hinting and code completion features which helps detect and correct coding errors.
• Move and Rename refactoring
• Advanced Media Features
• Cross Platform Capabilities (Mac version)
• Complete user documentation & Prescriptive Tutorials
• Defects & Regression Testing
• Developer Usability Testing

Version 2.0 is planned for Spring 2010. This is the roadmap:

• Silverlight 3.0 support
• Completion of re-organization Silverlight development environment
• Completion of the Extensibility, Support for Multiple Projects
• Improvements to Mac Platform
• Completion of Silverlight 3.0 Runtime Support "out of browser"

More Information can be found on the projects website www.eclipse4sl.org

If you are a Mac-User, there is also a plug-in for you. Check out the Microsoft Interop Website for Eclipse4SL.

Hello everyone,

I wish all of you a relaxing and successful 2010. See you on the other side )

Sascha

I had a little inspiration during the holidays – tried it out – and it worked.

With Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft introduced a new feature called Webslices. Little pieces of information within your browser-bar (most commonly) about site-updates.

Now I tried to put a Silverlight app into a Webslice.

Herefor I created a new Silverlight App with a testpage like this (created automatically)

<form id="form1" style="height: 100%;">
<div id="silverlightControlHost">
<object width="100%" height="100%" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">
<param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightWebslice.xap" />
<param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /><param name="background" value="white" />
<param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="3.0.40624.0" />
<param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />
</object></div></form>

In my Silverlight-App I placed a Textblock saying “Welcome to my Silverlight Webslice”.

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
        <TextBlock Text="Welcome to my Silverlight Webslice"></TextBlock>
  </Grid>

And then, in default.aspx I put the Webslices-Code

<form id="form1">
<div id="SliceID" class="hslice" style="display: none">
<span class="entry-title">Silverlight Slice
<a style="display: none" rel="entry-content" href="SilverlightWebsliceTestPage.html">Alternative</a>
</div></form>

and voila, a silverlight Webslice.

Have fun playing arund with it )

Before I forget, there is an alternative for Firefox Browser called WebChunks. Unfortunately it doesn’t work for the current Version at the moment, hope the developer will keep on working on it.

Sascha

Hello everyone,

as most of your Silverlight-Interested-People might already know, Microsoft has released the beta-version of the upcoming Silverlight Version 4. Lot of things are new, but instead of spreading it out myself, I want to post some references to really good summaries and tutorials I found.

All I really needed to do, to get started with SL 4 was (beside installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 which I already had on my machine) go to this page:

GetStarted Page for Silverlight 4 beta

download an install the tools. the new runtime is in the package too.

A pretty good summary of the new features can be found on Tim Heuers Blog:

Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features

And there is also a series of articles published by Alex Golesh that are hands-on-tutorials for some of the new features

• Silverlight 4: New features overview (Part 1) – Webcam/Mic Support
• Silverlight 4: New features overview (Part 2) – Printing Support
• Silverlight 4: New features overview (Part 3) – Elevated Out-of-browser applications
• Silverlight 4: New features overview (Part 4) – Out-of-browser applications: even more features
• Silverlight 4: New features overview (Part 5) – DataBinding improvements

I will surely write more about this topic during the next weeks, so stay tuned )

Sascha

Hello everyone,

to start a silverlight project, i have a kind of default-template which I enriched with a CSS-like decentralized style today. This is done very easy now in Silverlight 3. First you habe to set up a file containing your style. In my case it was a file in a new Styles folder called TextBock.Default.xaml where I entered this dummy code:

<ResourceDictionary
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 
    xmlns:Windows="clr-namespace:System.Windows;assembly=System.Windows">
    <Windows:Style x:Key="TextBlock.Default" TargetType="TextBlock">
        <Windows:Setter Property="FontFamily" Value="Times New Roman"/>
        <Windows:Setter Property="FontSize" Value="16"/>
        <Windows:Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Black"/>
        <Windows:Setter Property="LineHeight" Value="26"/>
    </Windows:Style>
</ResourceDictionary>

after that, I created a MergedDictionary in my app.xaml like that:

 <Application.Resources>
         <ResourceDictionary>
             <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
                 <ResourceDictionary Source="Styles/TextBlock.Default.xaml"/>
             </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
          </ResourceDictionary>
     </Application.Resources>

from now on, you can call this style like you’re used to with {StaticResource TextBlock.Default} within your application. Nice way to manage the styles as I think, and much easier to maintain than having all your styles plugged in your app.xaml in total.

Have fun playing with it )
Sascha

Hello everyone,

I just tried to figure out, how to pass initial parameters to a Silverlight App, that runs out of browser. We dont have a Webpage to pass InitParams and we cannot access Web.Config entries.

So i came up with the idea, to use Isolated Storage for this task. Before installing an App Out-Of-Browser we need to access the Webpage. In this case, we can read the initial paramters from Web.Config or from Silverlight-Tag, and store them to Isolated Storage.

Now we need a code-block to check, if app runs OOB (Application.Current.IsOutOfBrowser) and in this case, we read the paramters from Isolated Storage instead. So the OOB-App is configured the same way as the Web-App.

This was just one Idea, that worked. Any other suggestions are very welcome.

Hello everyone !

Hallo zusammen,

um schlichtweg mehr Leser anzusprechen werde ich die Blog-Sprache auf englisch umstellen. Ich hoffe, es stört nicht zu sehr )

A nice video about the usage of silverlight apps out-of-browser by Tim Heuer can be found here:

Video about Out-Of-Browser Experience