While Silverlight is an attractive option for developing expanded application, it brings new challenges to organizations. In preparation, companies must adapt their testing approach. Given the way new technologies work when deployed on internet/intranet applications, a careful approach to testing is important.
The DependencyProperty and DependencyObject which form the building blocks for most XAML features come with a performance cost. An MSDN article “Optimizing C# for XAML Platforms” discusses this in detail along with ways to minimize its impact.
Undo and Redo are commands that are commonly expected by end users and, when well implemented, can improve an application's usability significantly. At least two libraries exist that can help WPF and Silverlight developers for this purpose - a recently announced Undo-Redo framework from Infragistics (CTP) and an open source library called Undo.
Silverlight was originally seen as a Flash killer, but Flash itself is being replaced by HTML5. It was also seen as a way of delivering cross-platform applications, but iOS made that a non-starter as well. Surprisingly it is thriving in areas that were supposed to be the domain of WPF such as internal business applications and Silverlight 5’s updated security model reflects this.
While HTML5 is still a draft standard, its ultimate role as the dominant cross-platform solution is certain. Even Microsoft calls HTML “the only true cross-platform solution for everything.” But in many ways it is still severely limited when compared to Silverlight. Daniel Jebaraj of Syncfusion weighs in on the future of Silverlight and HTML5 with guidance on how to choose between the two.
Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown is a comprehensive guide to Silverlight application building using C#. It features several practical examples that explore flexible layout, control extensibility, the communication and binding models, rich media, animation and more.
InfoQ recently conducted a virtual panel via email on the current and future state of RIA and Ajax technologies. The panel features a number of valued contributors to the community including Dion Almaer, Jnan Dash, Didier Girard, Peter Pilgrim, Tim Sneath, and Ryan Stewart.
Roy Osherove discusses the difficulties met when trying to test code embedded in a framework (cog), presenting several possible solutions to create unit tests for cogs. He also presents Excavation, a technique used to create a domain specific test framework and some patterns used for cog isolation. The discussion centers around Silverlight code examples.
Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo, presents the Hard Rock Memorabilia web site containing pictures with 200 Mp resolution and how one can zoom in to see very fine details using Silverlight’s Deep Zoom. He also shows other projects to underline some of the Silverlight’s capabilities.
In this interview from QCon San Francisco 2008, Vertigo CEO Scott Stanfield discusses Silverlight. Topics covered include the Silverlight feature set, the development paradigm, developer/designer workflow, future changes in both versions 2 and 3, Silverlight adoption, cross-platform support, the future of RIAs, cloud computing, and business RIAs.
In this interview from RubyFringe, John Lam talks about his work on IronRuby and how Microsoft is approaching Open Source software development.
