Silverlight 3 Wish List ---- What We Got

Hi all,

Silverlight 3 Beta is released. Now it does fulfill many of the features that the community has hoped for. Joe Stegman has marged the Silverlight 3 wish lists from different sources (Including the thread I have started) and put them in a table sorted on popularity. Lets check it with what we got. This is partial and please help me complete it and let me know in cases I am wrong.

Feature	Count	Comments	Status	Note
Web camera and/or microphone input	33	Includes requests for just microphone as well	No
Bitmap APIs	26	Support get/set pixels and/or rendering a XAML scene to a bitmap.	Partial. (After reading the comments and in forums and agree with it)	Check this application.
Full 3D	24	Full 3D support (full 3D models)	Partial	Video1 Video2
Printing	20	Printing APIs	No
Offline and/or out of browser support	16	Support running Silverlight when not online (or completely out of the browser)	Yes	Video
Bi-directional text and/or complex script	9		No
UDP/P2P	9	UDP APIs generally for Peer to Peer support	No
Rich text support	8	Editing and display	No
Right mouse button	8	Ability to configure the right click	No
Text quality	8	Improved text quality	Partial	Clear type will be supported
HTML Integration	7	Support HTML hosting (live HTML documents) and/or HTML translation	No
Interactive designer	7	Support an interactive designer in Visual Studio	No	Will be with VS 2010
Support more than BasicHttpBinding	7	Most common request is for WSHttpBinding	No
Improve Silverlight/WPF compatibility	6	Mostly feature requests for either Silverlight and/or WPF	Partial	Gap is reducing over time
More controls	6	Random/general requests	Yes	With the new toolkit release it increases.
SaveFileDialog	6		Yes
Data and/or property triggers	5		No
Reporting services	5		No
Synchronous web service calls	5		No	Is it really needed?
ADO.NET DataSet/DataTable	4		Partial	Check out new data controls and RIA services.
Alpha video	4	Chroma key support
Clipboard support	4		No	Some people think of it as security threat. Workaround
Drawing APIs (immediate mode)	4			Pixel effects?
Element name binding	4			Element to element binding is now possible.
Improved DataGrid	4	Several different requests
Local relational database (SQL)	4
Modal dialog	4
Mouse wheel	4	API and support in existing controls	No	Helper class available
Selectable text	4
Assembly caching	3	Want a framework for downloading/managing assemblies	Yes	Here.
Credentials/auth	3	Requests for networking stack and ASP.NET type integration
Custom markup extensions	3		No
Multi-target DLLs for .NET/SL	3	Build a business object DLL once for both .NET and Silverlight	No
Multi-touch support	3
Path Animation	3		No
Speech and better audio decoder	3
VisualBrush	3		No
9 Grid	2
Better keyboard APIs	2	Platform independent keycode
Better SEO	2		Yes	Check this blog.
Binding support to anonymous types	2
Direct database access	2	OLEDB/ODBC equivalent	No
Flow panel	2
GIF support	2		No	Probably it wont be there. See what Pete Brown says.
Global/dynamic styles (skinning)	2
Integrated CTRL+F (in page search)	2
Sound APIs (equalizer)	2	Includes looping	No
TileBrush (Image Tiling)	2		No
XPS Support	2
64-bit platform support	1
Android support	1
Better N-tier support	1	Improved data access	Yes	RIA Services
Better SharePoint integration	1
Block style text	1	Bulleted lists, paragraphs	No	But check this out
Cell based animation	1
CollectionView	1
Color management	1
Digital/XAP signing	1
Double Click event	1		No	work around
Drag and Drop	1	Between the desktop and Silverlight	No
Full 5.1 sound	1	Currently fold down to stereo	No
IDataErrorInfo	1
Inverse kinematics (bones)	1	Flash 10 feature
MediaTimeline	1
Multi-binding	1
Navigation model	1	Includes browser history integration	Yes	Video
Validation controls	1		Yes	Check this.
XPATH support for data binding	1

Thanks...

Too Early For Silverlight 3?

Hi friends,
I am excited about what Silverlight 2 brings us. Still there are some features that we miss and might come in the next release. I have created a thread for Silverlight 3 Wish List in the Silverlight forums. Please add whatever you think might come in handy in next release. And yes Silverlight Team do care about the community.

SL 2 And All My Broken Applications

Silverlight 2 is released. Now it has some breaking changes that breaks all of beta 2 applications. Though Microsoft has given some time to update beta 2 application to RC0 so they will be compatible to final release I did not get time to update my applications that I will be doing when I get time. I will be making some other applications as well. I will have to update my posts so they are still relevant. Lots of changes....

Silverlight RC0...After A Long Wait

[ Silverlight 2 is now released so this post is no longer valid. ]

Silverlight RC0 has been shipped. It is only developers release but will be feature complete. I did not get much time to see if it breaks some of my applications. It does have some features we were waiting for but we expected some more. Anyway lets see how it works with the new expression blend service pack and VS tools.

Installing RC0 might be a bit painful as it needs uninstalling all previous SL things and needs some tools. Here is the steps I did to get it work.

1. Uninstalled everything related to beta 2. (Silverlight tools for VS, Expression Blend, Plugin -- Everything)
2. Installed Silverlight 2 RC0 developer runtime.
2. Installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.
3. Installed new Silverlight tools for VS 2008.
4. Expression Blend 2 trial version.
5. Blend 2 SP1.

Oops. Finally. :)

Steps might be different but I got it working this way.

One important thing is this is only developers release so publicly only beta 2 is available now. So we can't yet release the application in RC0 but lets prepare for the day. :)

Google Chrome - An Exciting Eeperience

Hi,

 Lets talk about something not directly related to Silverlight.

Last night Google launched Chrome, its new open source browser. It is currently in beta. I have tried it and it seems exciting. Here is my "half day experience" about it.

Things I like

1.Clean Interface: It has the cleanest interface of all the browsers I have used. While viewing websites you really will see the content not the browser.  It has one url bar and that is also used for searching.

2. Task manager:  Control -> Developer -> task manager or shift + escape. It shows which tab is using most of your cpu and memory and you can easily end it. It has high details of the processing running in it . Stats for nerds.

3.Most Visited sites: It has opera style speed dial feature that stores most visited 9 sites in thumbnail format for easy accessing. It also keeps trak of recent changes and provide a means to search history.

4.Developer support: It has a powerful javascript console and debugging support for helping developers. It also has support for CSS and html like Firebug in FF.

5. Incognito browsing: ctrl+shift+N. It will help you prevent your privacy while not storing anything of what you do in that window. It is an easy way when we have to surf internet from internet cafe or other untrusted places. 

6. Search history: We can search inside the history. ctrl + H.

7. Crash resistant: One tab is completely independent of others and crashing of one tab or taking longer time to load does not afect others. This is really exciting and I have not been successful to have it crash or misbehave.

8. Fast opening and closing time: In my experience it opens faster and close smoothly.

There are lots of other features that I like but above ones are the main ones I have seen now.

PS: It claims about being faster than other browsers that might be debatable. Though I can say it is not slower than those for sure.

Things I don't like

1. Password management: It will show your password if you go to  settings -> options -> minor tasks -> show saved password then choose the web site and show password. I think it should be controled by a master password like FF does and also it should not be enabled default.

Acid test : I have make Acid 3 test in it and it got a score of 76. Failed ofcourse. But it is still a decent score as              IE 7 scores 11             FF3   71         and        Opera-9   80 in it.

And oh Yes Silverlight! I am using Windows Vista as my OS. I have seen my blog in this browser and I can see my silverlight application there. But they do not function properly. :(. In Silverlight.net site I can see Silverlight 2 applications but not the Silverlight 1 applications. Silverlight 2 applications are also not working properly.  But that  does not seem to be a problem on long go as both are beta right now and if Chrome gets popularity Microsoft will get it work there too.

I will continue using it and will hope it gets good popularity soon.

Download link www.google.com/chrome

Beta 1 is dead

[ Beta 2 is dead too. This post is invalid after Silverlight 2 released ]

As we see with the linux development community there are some who like beta versions (me one of them). In Fedora download site I got it saying "Did someone say... beta?"

The main thing is there are some unknown or unintentional features (Bugs?!) that we use in betas to get our programs work. These hacks work great until the feature has been changed or removed :(. In the Code complete Steve Mcconnell warns us not to use them.

Anyway the code we have been building in Silverlight 2 beta 1 refused to work in beta 2. After some search and try error it did run but some parts needed complete rewrite.

Still I say its better to modify your application for beta 2 in case you did not do it yet. Here is why......

1. The user who is about to see it is more likely having latest plugin that is beta 2 and your beta 1 will refuse to work.

2. With time goes there will not be much help available for beta 1. Forum people will say UPGRADE.

3. There has been lots of modification from beta 1 to beta 2 but it is expected not to change much from beta 2 to final version.

So how to upgrade........

1. Uninstall your previous Silverlight stuffs. VS 2008 tool, Blend, everything.

2. Install new versions of those tools Silverlight tools beta 2. Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview.

3. Open your Visual Studio solution file. It will ask you to upgrade with beta 2.

4. Build your program. I will come to this point later.

5. After successfully build check the test aspx and html page of the website. There change type="application/x-silverlight-2-b2" in html and in aspx replace version attribute with MinimumVersion="2.0.30523". Also in the install silverlight link will be changed from http://go2.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108182 to http://go2.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=115261.

What if my build failed...........

There are huge modifications from beta 1 to beta 2. So your old application might need to modify.

1. See the change list from here.

2. In my case the problem was with WebClient class. Because WebClient has been moved to System.Net.dll.

3. Another problem you might face is with event bubbling. Jesse Liberty has a great post explaning it. Basically you wont be able to catch mouse or keyboard events for controls because they themselves handle it. It has been done to maintain similarity between WPF and Silverlight. There are some workarounds if you really want to handle those events yourself. First Modify the template of your control or build a custom control deriving from the control you want to modify.

What if all of them don't work for me.........

Forums :)