Binarymission Blog

Silverlight 3. Making me happy? :-)

I am pretty excited to see the current beta of the Silverlight 3 (SL3), but the "goods" it is to ship with, is it making me happy?

Having seen the list of things in the bag so far in SL3 (so far), I am pleased with the kind of work the team has put together to address some of those fundamental issues in SL2, but I am still disappointed to see some core bits missing.

Can I push Redmond to get these in the release too, since these missing ones being pretty core needs please? :-)

I am pushing myself hard with my customers to sell Silverlight as a LOB platform, but Microsoft is not really helping much in my efforts I have to say.

I am struggling to understand why Printing support is not in SL 3 list.
I would really appreciate a Document (XPS/PDF) toolkit so my sale of SL can win hearts and minds of my customers.... and I don't see that in SL 3.

Well, that instantly means a business opportunity for me to produce a 100% client side Silverlight XPS/PDF viewer control :-)

Considering we never know when SL 4 would be around, the status-quo of SL 3 is not really pleasing me.
Let me come to my personal frustration about what I am missing in SL 3 directly.
Having built the Virtualizing WrapPanel for WPF recently, I am designing / writing my next Silverlight control - a "Virtualizing Wrap panel".
To be honest, I expected all of my WPF Virtualizing Wrap panel code to be shared across to build my Silverlight variant, BUT I cannot!
Reason: I am missing IScrollInfo interface and (a very handy) VirtualizingPanel base class. I am currently writing all of that myself - its cool (and i am sure i will be able to pick most of the logic i have writen in my WPF variant of the control), but still I could have done things easily with some bare-bones in SL frameowrk classes from Microsoft on this.

Frankly, I think instead of investing too much time adding new 3D stuff/GPU acceleration, Pixel shading et al., i would have really appreciated MS to have brought-in the core and Line-of-business items like that ones I described as "missing". that would have made my life easy!

Well, if I look at it in the positive side, the missing bits in SL3 are my business opportunities ;-)

All that aside, I am happy to see some new stock items: (my favourite ones) Merged Dictionary, Dynamic styling (+ BasedOn), Element-to-element binding, Binding validation UI, Assembly caching, enabling occasionally connected applications (a.ka. O-O-B mode) in Silverlight 3.

OK, let me get back to finishing my Silverlight Ribbon and Silverlight Virtualizing WrapPanel controls :-)

Stay tuned :-)

- Sundar

Feeling relaxed... my WPF Ribbon .NET control released, Silverlight 2 variant coming soon! :-)

Feeling a bit relaxed having completed writing and releasing my new WPF Ribbon control:-)
I am currently in the final stages of completing my Silverlight 2 version of Office 2007 Ribbon control.

Before you ask me the obvious question: How much of my WPF codebase I was able to share to build the Silverlight 2 version?, let me tell you... its been about 30%.

I was able to share only some of my control classes, including value converters, and markup extensions code, but (obviously) none of my complex animations, styles with triggers, and all of my element to element binding bits across all of my XAML bits.It was truly an frustrating (although I enjoyed it!) and eye-watering experience :-(

Hmmm... That really does not sell Silverlight as a so-called "sub-set" of WPF - does it?
Well to be honest, we know SL is only a "conceptual sub-set" since its been written from scratch, and I can see Microsoft is trying its best to keep the API, tooling support and the Toolset to be similar across these two technologies, but that is as much they can go!! A single source, build for both is only a dream I think! :-)

Typically, I always recommend my customers (in my Consulting projects) to design and build for Silverlight first, and then port it to WPF (or if doing in parallel, then base the design on SL). That way you won't hurt yourself too much on the re-targeting exercise.
Ironically, contrary to what I practice in my consulting projects, in my product development, because of the known limitations of Silverlight 2 capabilities, the missing essential features/building blocks, and the remote hope of seeing the next SL version to address these gaps at the time I started to write the control, I never had any plan at first, to build a Ribbon for Silverlight. The plan was only for WPF to be honest, and hence the decision to build WPF to start with.

Half way into the WPF Ribbon, since my design was pretty flexible enough that I was constantly tempting myself to start off the Silverlight 2 variant of Ribbon :-), the Silverlight 2 variant has come along the way too - pretty nicely I would say :-) Rest assured it will see its day-light soon!

I will announce the Silverlight 2 Ribbon control soon, once I have completed the final parts (to support some of the "optional" MS Ribbon Fluent UI guidelines) and some tools to visually generate Ribbon bar and its contained UI elements (rather than to depend on Expression Blend) :-)

Stay tuned for release date announcements, and more upcoming new products, and of course my rants, frustrations, happy moments, and well.. everything "in between".

- Sundar