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
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