Rants Tagged with “Silverlight”
Due to a conflict with ReMix in Boston, we've decided to reschedule the Boston stop of the Silverlight Tour. The new Boston Workshop will be held on February 5-7th, 2008. Sign while slots are still available:
http://www.silverlight-tour.com
I was reading Scott Guthrie's blog entry that announced the Silverlight 1.0 release. He preps everyone for the Silverlight 1.1 changes in a short blub. It looks like he's hinting at features that everyone really wants:
It will support a WPF programming model for UI - including support for an extensible control model, layout management, data-binding, control skinning, and a rich set of built-in controls.
This seems to imply:
- "Extensible Control Model": What 1.1 has today, creation of your own controls that are usable in XAML. Good, but not news.
- "Layout Management": Sounds like Grid, StackPanel and other containers from WPF. This is very good news!
- "Data-Binding": Very very nice!
- "Control Skinning": Templates?
- "Built-in Controls": Buttons, TextBox, etc.? Cool.
This would allow Silverlight 1.1 could complete with Flash/Flex on a level playing field which is cool. I am not sure its necessary, but I am in the minority. I fear tha the plugin will become bloated, but so far its stayed pretty svelt so I have my fingers crossed.
What do you think?
Great news today out of Novell-land.
Miguel and company have agreed to collaborate with
Microsoft to deliver
Silverlight on Linux (the
Moonlight project) within six-months!
Microsoft is providing the codecs for video and
Mono is supplying the guts of the
Moonlight implementation. Read up on
Miguel's blog for the details!
In response to a comment on my Scrollable Region example, I wanted to see if scrollable regions in CSS work with Silverlight. It seems to work ok if you leave room for the scrollbar (e.g. if the Silverlight asset is 160px wide, make the div 180px or so wide). For example:
No Scrolling
Scrolling in CSS (overflow: auto;)
Scrolling in CSS (overflow: scroll;)
Grab the example and let me know you what you think!
If you are playing with Silverlight 1.0 and Visual Studio 2008 like I am, you've probably noticed that the templates won't install without Visual Studio 2005. Luckily there is a good workaround. The templates are a simple .zip file inside the MSI installer that just need to be placed in a specific directory to work..that's all. If you want to walk through specific steps to get the templates to work with Visual Studio 2008, follow these steps:
- To open the MSI file you need a way to extract the right file. "MSIEXEC -a" doesn't work because the MSI file will fail with pre-requisites. My suggestion is to use Less MSIerable. This tool allows you to open an MSI file and extract specific files.
- Using the tool, open the SL10Template.msi file in the Silverlight SDK directory (usually "C:\program files\Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 SDK\").
- Choose the "Extract Files" tab and pick the SilverlightJSApplication.zip.
- You will want to open your personal template directory. This is usually "c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#" for non-Vista and "C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#" for Vista.
- Once open, create a new directory (called Silverlight).
- When you click Extract on the tool, it will ask you for a location. Select the new Silverlight directory you just created.
- Open this new Silverlight directory and you'll see that its extracted the file into a deep set of directories. Dive down into these directories and at the end will be the SilverlightJSApplication.zip file. Cut and paste it back in the Silverlight directory you created and remove the extra directories. NOTE: The file you're placing in the template directory is a ZIP file...that is fine! Don't extract it otherwise Visual Studio will never see it.
- Lastly, from a command-line run Visual Studio with a setup flag (*YOUR VISUAL STUDIO DIRECTORY\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /setup) to make sure it scans the template directory.
- It will churn for a minute then go away (without showing the UI). I use Process Explorer (or Task Manager) to wait for it to disappear.
Then you can run Visual Studio 2008 and under "Visual C#" is a Silverlight directory with the new template: "Silverlight JavaScript Application":
Let me know if you have any improvements on this process.
UPDATE: This works the same on Visual Studio 2008 RTM!
I got a request today to explain how the scrolling region works that I use on my Silverlight page. Instead of using a complex example (like showing you that code) I decided to create a really simple example.
The trick to creating a scrolling region is to create a Canvas with a Clipping Path (you can do this with Expression and I have a video that shows how here). So the Canvas with a clipping region essentially is a window to a larger set of content. For example here is a simple canvas with a clipping mask. The arrows on the left show the size of the clipping region (the window into the the object) and the arrows on the right show the full size of the object itself:
To create a scrollable region, you wil just move the elements inside the clipping region canvas. For example:
<Canvas Name="theClipRegion" Clip="..." ...>
<Canvas Name="theCanvas">
... Your Content
</Canvas>
</Canvas>
In this example, when you click on the arrows it simply adds or subtracts 10 from the Canvas.Top of the "theCanvas" to move it within the Clipped Canvas. You don't need to move the clipping region because that's a window on the content within so you don't move the window, but the content inside.
You can get fancy and use an animation to do so (like I did for the Silverlight page) or something simple like this. It works vertically or horizontally. Grab the code and check it out!
Check out my new video on
Silverlight.net that shows you how to use the Downloader to create a "Loading..." page and download out-of-band assets like fonts and
XAML.
On September 5 at 3pm EST, I will be doing a GeekSpeak on Silverlight. Come on by and contribute to the conversation.
In this new article by Edd Dumbill, he explains how Moonlight was implemented using Mono. Its an interesting dive into how Miguel and the boys are implementing Silverlight on Linux. Its well worth a read.
(via Miguel de Icaza's Blog)
Don't tell anyone but I've been playing with Ubuntu on an extra server. I am having fun trying out MonoDevelop and seeing what of my apps run on Mono. Of course everyone knows I've been neck deep in Silverlight for a while so I navigated to my website using Firefox. I viewed the recent AJAX sample I blogged about earlier to see what would happen for Silverlight users on an unsupported platform. Here's my page on Firefox in Ubuntu (click on the images for full-size):
So far so good! So I clicked on the "Get Microsoft Silverlight" image in hopes it would take me to a page to install.
Wow, great. Still good. Now I don't expect the installation to work but we're getting close. So I clicked the Install Now button.
Disappointment. Sure, I knew it wouldn't work but going to an undefined page is just silly. I'd preferred to have seen a page that said that Silverlight wasn't supported (yet?) on Linux but at least explaining what it was. Too bad really. It would have been a good opportunity to either educate people about Silverlight or (on the optimistic side of the curve) even point them to Moonlight and encourage them to help Miguel and the boys get Moonlight working!
What do you think?
