InfoQ Homepage Silverlight Content on InfoQ
-
Moonlight Leaps Ahead of Silverlight with Hardware Accelerated Pixel Shaders
Recently David Reveman added significant amounts of hardware rendering to Novel’s Moonlight. This puts it in the lead over Silverlight, offers only a limited amount of hardware rendering support.
-
Silverlight Is for the Client, HTML5 for the Web
After saying about Silverlight that “our strategy has shifted” at PDC 2010, Bob Muglia attempted to clarify what he meant. Steve Ballmer and Tim Heuer also commented on Silverlight, trying to reassure the community on Microsoft’s commitment to Silverlight, but also pointing to the fact that HTML5 is the solution for cross-platform development, leaving Silverlight to the client and Windows Phone.
-
A DSL for Multi-touch Gestures
As part of the TouchToolkit, Frank Maurer and Shahedul Huq Khandkar have created a DSL for multi-touch gestures. The language is in a declarative style with two sections. The first section, labeled “validate”, contains the rules used to determine if a specific gesture is being performed. The second section contains the return values for the gesture.
-
.NET’s Platform Divergence Problem
For many years the platform dependency issues in .NET we very easy to understand. Almost everything people used was marked as either compatible with .NET Compact Edition or with the full edition. Aside from .NET Micro, which hardly anyone used, there wasn’t much else to worry about. But now that there is over a dozen active frameworks to choose from, the situation has grown quite complex.
-
PRISM 4 Is Now Code Complete
The patterns&practices team at Microsoft has released the latest version of its composite application guidance called PRISM 4 Drop 9, the library, the reference implementations and quick starts being code complete.
-
Windows Phone 7 has put the .NET Language Coevolution Promise in Doubt
In 2009 Microsoft’s Lucas Bolognese announced a commitment to co-evolution for C# and Visual Basic. And the productization of F#, some have assumed it extends to that language as well. But by only offering C# in the initial release of WP7, this promise has been brought into doubt.
-
Advanced Scenarios for LightSwitch
LightSwitch brings together a number of technologies including Silverlight, Managed Extensibility Framework, and WCF RIA Services. If LightSwitch becomes popular, developers who understand these technologies will have a significant advantage over those who simply wire forms together using the design surfaces.
-
Silverlight’s Role as a Web Application Technology is Debated
Brad Becker, Director of Product Management for Developer Platforms, has written a post outlining the future of Silverlight in an HTML5 world as seen by Microsoft, considering it fit for the web. Others consider Silverlight is not actually meant for web applications but it is rather serving a niche area within web development market.
-
Will HTML5 be Secure Enough?
Joab Jackson wrote an article detailing some of the potential vulnerabilities of the HTML5 standard set. Will security be the Achilles' heel of HTML5?
-
WAF and Caliburn: 2 WPF Application Frameworks
WPF Application Framework (WAF) and Caliburn are two open source frameworks providing the foundation to developers to write WPF/Silverlight applications based on the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern using a layered architecture.
-
Microsoft Aims Its Latest Tool, LightSwitch, at Professionals. Is it a Tool for Pros?
Microsoft has announced a new product, Visual Studio LightSwitch, during VSLive! keynote in Redmond. LightSwitch is a VS product tailored for easy creation of Line of Business (LoB) applications. Some developers wonder if LightSwitch is truly for professionals, comparing it with Access.
-
Fixing Data Binding Problems in WPF/Silverlight
The data binding in WPF and Silverlight is amazing in all regards. Its power and flexibility are beyond compare. Unfortunately its resistance to traditional debugging techniques is equally impressive for the wrong reasons. There is no way to really step through the data binding process, but we collected some other techniques that developers may find useful.
-
Karl Shifflett Shows How to make VS 2010’s Binding Builder Actually Work
Visual Studio 2010 comes with a feature they call the “Binding Builder”. This tool, launched from the properties pane, helps developers quickly construct XAML bindings for WPF and Silverlight. But without some help, it doesn’t work when the data context is only set at runtime. Karl Shifflett shows how to work around this using design-time markup extensions.
-
Prism Prevents One Incomplete Feature from Derailing an Entire Release
Having modular code does not help when applications still have to be deployed in an all-or-nothing fashion. Prism addresses this by allowing you do deploy a WPF or Silverlight shell to the users separately from any specific functionality. Individual features are released out-of-band as modules that may be stored locally, on a corporate file share, or served up by a web site.
-
F# Now Supports Silverlight
Slipped into the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio release is F# for Silverlight 4. While C# or VB is still recommended for UI design, F# offers some interesting capabilities for the business tier, especially if it is heavy on computations or data processing logic.