Silverlight SDK

Silverlight 4 Beta Released!

snoutholder — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:33:00 GMT

WHOOT!

Here's some links to get you synced up:

- Get Started (e.g. get new tools, SDK, runtime, tutorials, other links)
- What's New in Silverlight 4
- Breaking Changes (good to read if you're migrating older apps to Silverlight 4)
- Offline Silverlight 4 MSDN Documentation
- Online Silverlight 4 MSDN Docs

Silverlight 4 Beta Offline MSDN docs (CHM) is available

snoutholder — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:55:00 GMT

You can get the Silverlight 4 Beta Offline MSDN documentation here. The CHM is nice if you're offline plus it's faster than the online content, has an index, and only contains Silverlight content.

IMPORTANT! If you open the CHM and cannot view content, do the following to resolve the issue:
- Right-click the CHM file, and then click "Properties".
- Click "Unblock".
- Double-click the .chm file to open the file.

Silverlight 4 Beta Bugs

snoutholder — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:48:00 GMT

This is a list of Silverlight 4 Beta Bugs that didn't make it into the readme. For a much larger list of bugs and/or issues Silverlight developers might like to know about this release, see Silverlight 4 Beta Release Notes.

Bug List:

Can't print to an A3 sized paper from a Mac

Printing to an A3 sized paper outputs a blank sheet for both portrait and lanscape prints when printed from a Mac.

Are You Classic or Lightweight? The MSDN Redesign

Wolf Schmidt [MSFT] — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:06:00 GMT

MSDN recently rolled out new presentation choices for its Library content, which includes the MSDN online section for Silverlight:

If you haven't been there recently here's your obligatory handy link: Silverlight 3 on MSDN

The added presentation choices are a Lightweight view and a Script-Free view. To change the views, click the orange, docked Switch View button. With a switched view, you may notice that you'll have an additional qualifier string in the address bar that shows you the MSDN URL, for example: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc838158(VS.95,classic).aspx although your view is also potentially session-preserved without that necessarily being in the URL.

The MSDN redesign was originally announced by Soma on Oct 19th. You can learn more about the redesign by following links from that post.

Probably the most immediately observable difference in the presentations is how the Table of Contents (TOC) is treated. In Classic view the TOC remains fully expanded for context. In Lightweight and Script-Free views, the TOC filters down to showing immediate peer topics, and does not show expansion and the set of peers that exist at each decision point as you "walked" the TOC to get to the current page. Depending on your connection speed, Lightweight can potentially help pageload time. The TOC in Classic does a lot of scripting and downloaded pieces, and synching the TOC might be slowing down your pageloads. On the other hand, the full context of the TOC can be nice to see. Not all who wander are lost, right?

I'd be interested in knowing what the Silverlight developer audience thinks of the redesign, and which view this audience prefers. The SDK team often holds the superstition that a Silverlight developer audience uses MSDN more than any offline documentation source, since Silverlight is a Web technology and MSDN is ... on the Web. Plus Silverlight inherently touches on a lot of issues of onscreen design and UI usability. If that's so, then I'd expect Silverlight developers to be even more willing to share their opinion.

Maybe it's just me, but the concept of "Classic versus Lightweight" makes me think of Charles Atlas. :-)

Silverlight 3 online and offline Docs updated

snoutholder — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:45:00 GMT

We just refreshed the online docs for Silverlight 3. In addition, the offline CHM has been updated. Most of the updates were just doc bug fixes. Right now writers are mostly focused on documenting Silverlight 4 Beta features (of course SL4 Beta hasn't released yet).

Sam

Silverlight designer sample code is posted

jgalasyn — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:45:44 GMT

If you’ve been wishing for some helpful designer gestures for your Silverlight DataGrid controls, look no further. The Silverlight Designer Sample is available at the WPF and Silverlight Designer Extensibility site. It demonstrates a pretty neat designer implementation for Silverlight’s TabControl and DataGrid controls.

Silverlight TabControl design-time implementation sample

Silverlight DataGrid design-time implementation sample

You’ll need Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 or higher. Download the code from here: Silverlight Designer Sample and enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,WPF,Visual Studio,designer,DataGrid,.NET Framework

Bing Visual Search Powered by Silverlight!

niravi — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:58:00 GMT

Yusuf Mehdi demonstrated Bing's new Silverlight powered Visual Search experience yesterday. Using Visual Search you can use images as keywords to search the Web. Visual Search allows you to quickly scroll through the gallery content or do a one-click refinement using the quick tabs on the left, which are specifically relevant to the type of results you are browsing through.

Visual Search is a Silverlight application, as Silverlight allows fast manipulation of the large data sets that hold the information of each gallery and also a compelling visual presentation of the data.

Enjoy the Visual Search here. For more information visit the Bing Blog.

-Nitya.

Silverlight delivers online viewing experience for Sunday Night Football

jgalasyn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:21:36 GMT

The NFL and NBC will be delivering the entire Sunday Night Football season by using Silverlight 3.0 and IIS Smooth Streaming. The first game of the season will be broadcast tonight, with the Tennessee Titans vs. the Pittsburg Steelers. Game starts at 5:00pm PST and you can watch online for free: http://snfextra.nbcsports.com/.

Here are a few of the benefits Silverlight delivers:

A full screen video player that is capable of delivering 720p HD video. TV quality on the web.
A main HD video feed, plus 4 user-selectable alternate synchronized camera feeds that allows users to switch camera angles themselves. Your TV can’t do that.
Adaptive smooth streaming of live HD video, which enables the video player to automatically switch bitrates on the fly depending on networking/CPU conditions. No buffering/stuttering experience.
DVR support of the live video, including Pause, Instant Replay, Slow Motion, Skip Forward/Back. You can pause and rewind on live video.
Play-by-play data (touchdowns, fumbles, etc) inserted as tooltip chapter markers on the scrubber at the bottom allowing you to quickly seek to key moments. A smarter, contextual DVR.
Highlights of major plays created within minutes of the play. NBC is cutting on-demand highlights and publishing them on-the-fly with Smooth Streaming.
Sideline interviews with the players. No more channel surfing, you are one click away from additional content.
Game statistics. These are live stats coming dir-ctly in real-time from the NFL.
Game commentary and Q&A with the SNF hosts. Chat with the live TV broadcasters.

Enjoy! http://snfextra.nbcsports.com/

Technorati Tags: .NET Framework,Silverlight

New networking stack in Silverlight 3

cherylws — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:40:00 GMT

In previous versions of Silverlight, the browser handled all the HTTP communication for the Silverlight plug-in. The browser HTTP stack works well but has some limitations including the HTTP methods you can use and the response codes that are accepted. In Silverlight 3, you can opt-in to have the Silverlight client perform the HTTP handling. By opt-in, I mean, if you don't specifically choose the client to perform HTTP processing, it will be done by the browser, just like it always has been. However, if you decide you need to call REST services, you can easily do this with Silverlight3 by opting in to the client HTTP stack.

Here’s a table that summarizes some of the basic HTTP capabilities of Silverlight 3 and whether browser or client HTTP handling supports the capability.

Specifying the HTTP stack is easy. You simply call the WebRequest.RegisterPrefix method, passing the ClientHttp object to specify client HTTP handling or a BrowserHttp object to specify browser HTTP handling. You do this before you make any web requests. One important thing to remember is that once you have specified the client or browser HTTP stack for a particular domain or scheme, you can’t change it.

The following code shows how to specify client handling all HTTP and HTTPS requests and responses.

bool httpResult = WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("http://", WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);

bool httpsResult = WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("https://", WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);

You can also use the WebRequest.RegisterPrefix method to register a specific domain. The following code shows and example of how to do this.

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp.Create(new Uri( http://api.search.live.net/qson.aspx?query=Silverlight));

For more details (and VB code) on specifying Client or browser HTTP handling, see How to: Specify Client or Browser HTTP Handling.

For more details on general HTTP capabilities and how to make HTTP requests with Silverlight, plus some security considerations if you are hosting Web services for Silverlight clients, see HTTP Communication and Security with Silverlight.

Seadragon.Com

niravi — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:51:00 GMT

Microsoft Live Labs recently released Seadragon.Com. Using Seadragon, you can share any size image on the net as a zoomable photo. You can then share the image on Facebook, Twitter, or embed it directly on your blog or any other site.

The picture viewer is developed using the Silverlight Deep Zoom technology because of which the image loads quickly irrespective of the size. The viewer also adjusts dynamically to the layout of your page, or can be easily customized to a specific size so that any size image fits perfectly on your site. And since Seadragon.com uses a dual-mode Silverlight & AJAX control, it works on virtually any browser--automatically using Silverlight to provide a smoother experience and better performance when available, and defaulting to a scripted viewer when it is not.

You can learn more about Deep Zoom in Silverlight Deep Zoom Documentation.

-Nitya.

Use Try/Catch Block with Analytics Object (Silverlight 3 bug)

snoutholder — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:19:00 GMT

Some folks have found that a small percentage of customer machines are throwing an exception when the Analytics object is instantiated. To work around this bug for now, use a Try/Catch block when you attempt to instantiate the Analytics object.

For more information on the underlying issue, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300956

Expression Blend 3 released!

niravi — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:14:00 GMT

On July 10th Scott Guthrie and Soma launched Expression Blend 3 and and SketchFlow, and today, the full version of Expression Blend 3 including SketchFlow was released. You can check out the Expression Web site, and don't forget to download the 60 day trial version!

You can find new features of Blend 3 here: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Blend_Features.aspx.

-Nitya.

Silverlight 3 Offline CHM released!

snoutholder — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:31:00 GMT

Download the MSDN offline docs for Silverlight 3 here. The CHM is nice if you're offline plus it's faster than the online content, has an index, and only contains Silverlight content. The plan is to update this CHM at the end of every month, so stop by when you want to download an update.

Please post a comment if you have any feedback, thanks!

Sam

New controls in Silverlight 3

cherylws — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:46:00 GMT

Silverlight 3 runtime and SDK introduce many new controls. Some of these controls were previously released as part of the Silverlight Toolkit and some are completely new. Regardless of their origins, since they are now part of the Silverlight 3 product, these controls have full reference documentation that includes art, code examples and links to live samples. These controls enable scenarios such as auto-completion for a textbox, the display of hierarchical data, navigation within pages of a Silverlight application and much more. Here's a list of new controls and dialogs:

AutoCompleteBox (my personal favorite)

VirtualizingStackPanel

In addition to the new controls, the ListBox control now enables multiple selections using the SelectionMode property.

For a listing of all the Silverlight controls in alphabetical order, see Controls and Dialogs. For a listing of the controls by function, see Controls by Function.

F1 for Silverlight in Visual Studio is still targeting the Beta1 content: Here's a workaround

Wolf Schmidt [MSFT] — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:59:00 GMT

Unfortunately, the web service that underlies the F1 behavior in Visual Studio is flawed. Specifically when you are trying to find a Silverlight API, the service is promoting the old, v3 beta1 content for Silverlight, and will show you that page (the v3 beta1 content still exists on MSDN as pages but it's mostly hidden, not in the TOC). Although the beta content is often adequate at a very basic level, you are missing out on documentation improvements made since then, such as possibly snippets, remarks, etc, and it's also annoying not having an anchor in the TOC.

The workaround in Visual Studio 2008 is as follows:

1) Use F1 as you normally would. You will often see that the inital page is the beta1 version. You can identify these by the presence of the string (vs.96) towards the end of the URL in the address bar.

2) Notice on the far left of the integrated Help window there is a little dropdown titled "F1 Options". Choose the next result down. This will generally be the true version 3 RTM topic you are looking for. You can confirm this because the end of the URL is now (vs.95) AND you should be able to see a Table of Contents that successfully synchs to your topic.

Here are some further notes.

Often there will be multiple results in the F1 Options dropdown, beyond just the correct version 3 page. This can happen if the string highlighted and transmitted for the F1 service query is potentially ambiguous. Because the majority of Silverlight API also exists as a .NET API, the lower results are generally .NET topics published at various .NET versions, NOT a Silverlight topic. The service is using contextual information such as project type and reference assemblies to give you what it thinks is the best match, but might also give you the others as "near misses" and provide them as the F1 Options list. It was ALMOST working in that it is at least ranking .NET results lower, but unfortunately is being tripped up within the Silverlight results by this MSDN versioning issue.

For a class, the "Members" page is the intial page that comes up. There is also a "Class" page available from within the "F1 Options" results.

Initially, F1 will strike out trying to find any of the API that was added after the Silverlight 3 beta. And unfortunately my workaround will not work in many of these cases. The initial page displayed won't be a beta1 page (since there is no beta1 page) and exactly what comes up varies wildly. You might get a .NET page, or a like-named API from a totally random technology like primary interop assemblies for Office. You can still find a version 3 Silverlight result somewhere in the "F1 Options" list .... maybe. For instance I tried this with UIElement.MouseWheel, which was added to Silverlight 3 after the beta. Sadly, there were 15+ results, and you don't get enough information from the text displayed in "F1 Options" to know what to do if the second displayed result isn't right either. In this case, I think you are probably better off just opening a web browser to MSDN online, and using the TOC or searching for the API string either with filters or by including the text "Silverlight" as part of your search string.

Embarassing fact: I didn't even know that the "F1 Options" UI item existed in the Visual Studio help UI until I discovered this problem and rooted around for a workaround :-)

This issue is only relevant if your Visual Studio settings have you using online F1. Offline F1 for Silverlight is actually a non-starter; there is no HXS documentation collection shipped as part of the Silverlight SDK or by any other means, so Visual Studio has nothing to reference. If you intend to do a lot of Silverlight work, use the online F1 setting. You can change this from the Help-Online dialog in the Options.

The issue and the workaround are the same whether you use the Integrated Help Viewer or External Help Viewer option by the way; the "F1 Options" UI is present in both.