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

Silverlight Cream for June 25, 2008 -- #309

Community Blogs — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:29:52 GMT

Emil Stoychev with a Silverlight Twitter Widget, Kathy Kam on the missing WatermarkedTextBox, Adam Kinney

Silverlight.js available on MSDN Code Gallery

Piotr Puszkiewicz's Silverlight Blog — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:13:49 GMT

Silverlight.js is now available for download on MSDN Code Gallery via http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightjs

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: 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, 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 — 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 — 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!