Latest Articles: Silverlight

Despite of native Silverlight support in SharePoint 2010 there are a lot of hidden issues how to develop, debug and test SL. In this post I will share the challenges I experienced with Silverlight in SharePoint 2010 and solutions to help others to cut the corners.

Nice intro about how does Silverlight integrates in Sharepoint 2010, good reading for a SL developer: how to deploy a Silverlight component, debug it, ... issues that you will find.

Learn the basics of layout in Expression Blend by exploring how to use the layout panels. Learn how to work with canvases, grids, and stack panels.

We as Silverlight developers can consider ourself like XAML Ninja's... but sooner or later we have to learn Expression Blend (that black background tool), Why? It Saves you tons of time and effort and let you create a nice layout in some minutes.

In this 16 minutes video you will learn how to play with layout containers (Canvas, StackPanel, Grid), the most interesting part is how to define columns and rows in a Grid and how to lock / unlock cells to let your user interface fit if user resizes the window.

Over the weekend, I was working on the Printing chapter of my Silverlight 4 Book. As part of that chapter, I decided to build a simple report writer. While there's a lot of other useful stuff in the chapter (buy my book! ) I felt the report writer could be very useful to release into the wild.

Excellent extension to Silverlight 4 printing API, if you need some simple report capabilities (items printing, paging, header / footers) this will save you life :)

There’s a new namespace in Silverlight 4 – System.Windows.Printing where you’ll find a few classes – the most important of which is the new PrintDocument which provides an event driven approach to printing. You construct one of these things, give it a name and tell it to print and then it calls you back to find out what it is you’d like to print.

nice intro to Silverlight 4 printing, covers some advanced topics like how to add paging.

Missing managing with DPI, I think default on SL printing is 96 DPI.

The Silverlight 4 printing support allows you to specify a XAML tree to print. Overall its pretty simple. It all starts with the PrintDocument class. This class exposes several events that are used to call back to ask you about how to print individual pages.

Good intro to Silverlight 4 printing features, you will find here how it works, advantages and limitations of this implementation.

The code is Beta based, you will need to make some small tweakings to make it work.

it’s possible to build rich frameworks on top of them for accomplishing common printing tasks. In this post, I’ll take a look at an attempt I made (and added to SLaB) at building such a higher-level API over printing that makes printing collections of data easier.

Quite good post about Silverlight 4 and printing, it covers advanced scenarios,like paging, headers, footers.

Silverlight 2 introduced rich networking to Silverlight. With classes such as WebClient and HttpWebRequest, you could call Web services, perform duplex networking, consume RSS, perform asynchronous downloads of images, assemblies, and other assets, and more. In Silverlight 2, all networking was performed using the browser’s HTTP stack—in other words, Silverlight used the networking APIs exposed by the browser. This insulated Silverlight from the underlying operating system, but it also placed some annoying limits on what Silverlight could do. In Silverlight 2, for example, SOAP faults couldn’t be propagated back to the client because the browser converted the HTTP 500 error codes accompanying those faults into HTTP 404 (“Page Not Found”) errors. And in Silverlight 2, you were limited to the HTTP commands GET and POST because some browsers impose similar limits in their networking APIS.

Network Stack quite useful (introduced on Silverlight 3), one of the benefits I like the best is trouble shooting, you get on the client side detailed information about the exception generated on the server side.

Silverlight 3 offers us some new features when it comes to WCF web services. In Silverlight 2, BasicHttpBinding was the only supported binding. This essentially encodes your serialized objects in clear text and sends them over an HTTP transport. Because the objects were sent as clear text, the message size could get out-of-hand. When sending data across HTTP/Internet, you obviously want to decrease the size as this will improve performance of your client application. Silverlight 3 offers the ability to create custom bindings which support the ability to encode your WCF web service messages as a binary format.

If you have to send medium / big packages, this new feature in Silverlight (support for WCF binary message encoding) will save you tons of bandwith and just by turning of some settings (transparent to your code).

If you have to give support to asmx... no way you can't use this :-(

Today, I was trying to figure out why my WCF service call was always throwing the generic NotFound exception when trying to retrieve large datasets. I had all the buffer limits set to 2147483647 (int.MaxValue) at Silverlight service configuration file as well as WCF service configuration section under web.config. Some more analysis revealed that I was getting a System.Net.WebException, saying: The underlying connection was closed: The connection was closed unexpectedly. After some research, I found that I need to set the maxItemsInObjectGraph for dataContractSerializer to some higher value in my web.config.

If you have to send big packets on your WCF service calls first thing about chopping them and use several calls to complete the sending... if you cannot go for that, or don't have time to implement it, or for instance your app is running in an intranet, you can tweak something (Silverlight Application, server side web.config) to accept bigger requests (serialization maxgraph, plus packet size, plus timeout defaults plus httpRunTime default settings).

Following the steps of this article you will get it working.

Welcome to the Silverlight feature suggestion forum. Please vote or submit a feature suggestion. If it is not a product feature request it might be moderated.

Do you want to know what are the hot topics other Silverlight Developers are willing?

Do you want to vote and ask for a new feature on a next Silverlight release?

Please note this is a helpful tool in helping planning of ideas and understanding how developers use Silverlight. It may not always represent the actual priority list for the product team. ... But is a good communication channel :-)

At the recent PDC, Scott Guthrie announced in his Silverlight 4 keynote that we had implemented a new feature, to enable developers to share certain assemblies between Silverlight and .NET. There are many differences between Silverlight and full .NET including WPF, and this new feature doesn’t solve those differences – in those cases, you’ll still need to compile your code twice. But in some cases, developers will write code that only uses features whose behavior is identical between Silverlight and full .NET, and in those cases, we want to enable that code to be shared. This post provides more detail on that sharing, and explains how developers can target it, and what the restrictions are.

Great news, now is possible to share assemblies between project created with the SL framework and those created using the standard version of the framework. It has some limitations of course, but is great to share libraries with entities, validations, ...