November, 2007

Mike Harsh announced recently the first Service release for 1.0.
The release includes perf improvements, a few fixes (e.g. streaming over proxies not using port 80), and a few "new'' features for SL 1.0 like allowing media redirects. 
 
Most users will be getting this release via the auto-updater and no changes are required for most websites that have gone live with 1.0... 
For a very few websites that must require their users have the Service Release installed to take advantage of the new features, here are some interesting (low-level details:

• The version of the Service Release is 1.0.21115 .  
• To require the user to upgrade, all you have to do is specify your minimum version to 1.0.2115 in the call to Silverlight.createObject<>...

Silverlight.createObjectEx({
source: "Page.xaml",
parentElement: document.getElementById("SilverlightControlHost"),
id: "SilverlightControl",
properties: {
width: "100%", height: "100%",
version: "1.0.21115"

},
events: { /*...*/ }

});
Silverlight.js does all the work to make sure this version is installed and if not, it will show the "Get Silverlight" or what ever your install experience displays..

• There is one small wrinkle with this. Tim Sneath has explained in previous posts that the 1.1 alpha is not being serviced or auto-updated (yet)..  and since 1.1 is a 'greater version' than 1.0.21115,  then any users who have 1.1 will go to a site that requires 1.0.21115 and not be prompted to install.. 
• To be very low-level,  calling Silverlight.isInstalled ( "1.0.21115" ) or  <slplugin>.IsVersionSupported( "1.0.21115" )   on a machine that has 1.1 will return true (makes sense since 1.1 > 1.0.x  and MS is always backwards compatible for example 1.1 already has the changes, we just have not released an update) 
• For a workaround, you can of course use Silverlight.isInstalled ( "1.1" );   to detect if 1.1 is installed and if so possibly prompt advise to your users recommending they uninstall 1.1 and install 1.0  SR1....
  

If you are reading this and thinking it is confusing, rest assured you are likely OK. All of these details apply to a tiny subset of users ( that disabled auto-update.. or installed 1.1and are visiting one of the few sites requiring 1.0.21115. For the other 99.9995% of the users, there is no action item.

If you are curious to know what version of Silverlight you are running,  here is a trivial html site that can tell you; and it gives you my advise on what to do..
View Source will work since it is only 3 lines to check.

If you  are running VS 2008 "Orcas" RTM .. you will need the "Silverlight Tools refresh for Vsisual studio 2008"..   released today...
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=25144C27-6514-4AD4-8BCB-E2E051416E03&displaylang=en
Includes:
1) Website and item templates for SL 1.0
2) templates for Silverlight 1.1 alpha ( shipped in August)..

I have been involved in a handful of Silverlight projects where we ended up reinventing buttons, sliders, etc. I have been telling myself I would eventually merge these controls and last week I finally started;  I chose to do it from scratch taking the 'lessons learned' from each project so that along the way I would create a reference for others..

You can see an early sample showing the controls here.  It includes button, label, hyperlink, checkbox, togglebutton, repeatbutton, slider, radio, checkbox, stackpanel. dockpanel, expander, scrollbars, scrollviewer and a few other primitives needed..  You can also see a long ramblign of the design and implementations decisions here.  If you have done some thing similar or are thinking about it, please do send me your feedback. I created a new codeplex project where i am going to try to clean up the current prototype and  package into a reusable library. Of course if you want to join the codeplex project there is lots of room to contribute ..

Again, the library still needs a lot of clean-up, bug fixes, packaging, etc. expect I will be working on it a few hours a day all of next week.
Look for updates here and via codeplex (where the source is).

Acknowledgement/credits:
I leveraged lessons learned from my projects and external projects I have contributed to so I should give credit to Frog Design (MLB, CBS), AARF(Netflix), Metaliq(Terra), StepChange ( Silverlight.net showcase),  Tafiti ( DPE peers that encouraged me to reuse their code, will reuse more as we go), the expression encoder templates, and from discussions or even newsgroups.  I also reused and butchered heavily existing WPF concepts,names, etc. apologies for not keeping the concepts accurate; they morphed as needed to accommodate for what ever I was needing each time.