Piotr Puszkiewicz's Silverlight Blog - All Comments

re: Structure of the Silverlight Object Tag

sharkboy — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 09:13:19 GMT

I am finding that Silverlight is still a bit buggy. It seems that it not living up to it's cross browser pledge.

I for one hate sites that try and use an RIA such as flash for the whole page. In most cases the user experience is just bad. What I like to do is mix it up and use Silverlight to do only what can't be done any other way.

So, I have a media player set up so a user will click a link that calls a JavaScript function such as Play(123) where 123 is the ID of a song.

My silverlight control calls a web service that gets the URL of a the media file and a bunch of meta data. All works fine on IE and Safari but I get a Media Error on Firefox.

I am not sure what I am doing wrong but I should get a consistent behavior and I am not.

re: What's new in the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK's Silverlight.js file?

grisjuan — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:31:01 GMT

It's not a 'real' app ... I was just studying the installation experience. I'll redo the whole app from scratch now that an RTW is available and I'll report back in a couple of weeks.

Thanks!

When Silverlight 2 Releases, Will You be Ready?

Matt Powell — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:38:57 GMT

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has been out since June 6th and the number of sites that have taken advantage of

When Silverlight 2 Releases, Will You be Ready?

Matt Powell — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:38:42 GMT

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has been out since June 6th and the number of sites that have taken advantage of

re: What's new in the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK's Silverlight.js file?

PiotrP — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:52:47 GMT

grisjuan, can you share a pointer to your app? I would like to take a closer look at what is going wrong.

Piotr

re: What's new in the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK's Silverlight.js file?

grisjuan — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:55:11 GMT

My code is below. It would be cool to be able to remove the last line where I call reload, but I couldn't get it to work in FireFox 3, the app would not start automatically without it.

In my testing, I went to "Programs and Features" and uninstalled the plugin before each attempt, so it should not have been an 'upgrade' scenario.

Thanks for your suggestions so far, your posts on this have been really helpful!

Silverlight.onSilverlightInstalled = function()

{

var div = document.getElementById("host");

div.innerHTML = "<p>Install successful...</p>";

setTimeout(load, 3000);

}

function load()

{

var parent = document.getElementById("host");

Silverlight.createObject

(

"Card.xap", // source

parent, // parent

"silverlightControl", // id of new app

{ version: "2.0" }, // properties

null, // events

null, // initParams

null // context

);

window.location.reload(false); // needed to add this for FireFox

}

re: What's new in the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK's Silverlight.js file?

PiotrP — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:49:49 GMT

GRISJUAN,

The refresh should not be required in any browser, assuming that the user does not have a previous version of Silverlight installed. You can overwrite the value of Silverlight.onSilverlightInstalled with a new function that injects the object tag for you. This way, you can use the detection logic in Silverlight.js and still get the injection behavior you are looking for.

You should also examine the value of Silverlight.isBrowserRestartRequired. If a user is doing an upgrade then they will need to restart their browser before using the newer control. The recommendation for this scenario is to wait for the user to click the installation link. Once they do, replace your installation prompt with something like "Thanks for upgrading Silverlight. When installation is complete, please restart your browser and come back to <YOUR URL>." This way the user understands what is going on every step of the way.

As to the Firefox Save/Cancel dialog, that user experience is outside of your site's control. However, a Firefox user is likely to be comfortable with the Firefox experience around downloads and therefore should not have problems with finding and running the installer.

Thanks,

Piotr

re: What's new in the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK's Silverlight.js file?

grisjuan — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:00:06 GMT

I'm working on the "guided install" you suggest (and your post is very helpful, thanks).

I basically have it working in IE7 and FF3 now. One question: in Firefox 3, when I call getSilverlight the only options Firefox gives the user are "Save" and "Cancel" so the user has manually to go to their Downloads directory and run the .exe. After the install when I inject the object tag into the div, I still need to refresh the page (refresh isn't needed in IE7). Does that sound right?

Thanks!

re: Firefox 3 support added to Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK's Silverlight.js

MSDNArchive — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:09:47 GMT

As per my comment on another post, it sounds like the object tag is what I want to use instead of Silverlight.js for my Silverlight 2 sites :0

re: Silverlight.js available on MSDN Code Gallery

MSDNArchive — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:08:47 GMT

Nevermind, it soujnds like the object tag is the way I want to go as per your explanation in this post.

http://blogs.msdn.com/piotrp/archive/2008/06/23/instantiating-silverlight-html-vs-script.aspx#comments

Thanks, Piotr!