This post will be about new features in next version of Silverlight, which is planned for availability in 2009.
On November 16th Scott Guthrie revealed Silverlight 3 will include:
These are just a small sampling of the improvements.
Last week I saw three interesting PDC presentations about Silverlight. So in this post I write about Silverlight future components and mobile edition of the technology.
PDC Silverlight sessions I've seen:
Microsoft Silverlight 2 for Mobile: Developing for Mobile Devices
Silverlight 2 for mobile supports .NET programming model. You don't need to change code of your Silverlight 2 application, but you can recognize displaying device (DeviceInformation class) to do some actions (for example making full-screen only for mobile devices). You can also use wrapper to recognize gestures. Public CTP will be available at Q1 during 2009. Excellent session with many practical demos! (at the end very interesting demo with ducks which depend on position of mobile phone).
Microsoft Silverlight Futures: Building Business Focused Applications
Second part of this session 'Futures' is quite interesting. In the future Microsoft will add page navigation and frameworks for business applications (for example validation, authentication, business objects, data paging). Business Logic Framework will make building n-tier applications simpler. You should see practical demo with these new components. Team is also working on editable Visual Studio Silverlight designer, design time databinding support, core platform enhancements and many new controls.
Silverlight Controls Roadmap
This session is about Silverlight Toolkit (WPF controls: DockPanel, WrapPanel, TreeView, Expander, Label, ViewBox, HeaderedContentControl, HeaderedItemsControl + new controls: AutoComplete, Charting, NumericUpDown + 6 themes with Implicit Style Manager). IMHO AutoComplete control is very useful and cool! Silverlight Toolkit will be updated with new components ( Accordion, ListView) and many improvements (f.e charting, designer). What's more - Microsoft thinks about making more new controls (MIX 2009 - MediaPlayer, TimePicker, Carousel, Rating, MaskedTextBox; in future: InPlaceEditing, AppoinmentCalendar, ImageMap, FileUpload, Menu, Slideshow).
This post will be about value inheritance of dependency properties in Silverlight.
You cannot write custom dependency property with inheritance. There is the fixed set of predefined properties with value inheritance, for example: FontFamily, FontSize, FontStretch, FontStyle, FontWeight, Foreground. There was a problem with performance and Silverlight team did a number of optimizations specific to those particular properties. All properties have the same precedence order:
1. animations -> 2. local value (and binding) -> 3. templated property -> 4. style -> 5. value inheritance -> 6. default value
BTW, Silverlight Toolkit introduces one more way to customize controls - themes. Theme has lower priority than style, but higher than value inheritance.
Here are some useful Silverlight links which I visited last month.
Silverlight 2 Released: New controls, tools, announcements! - what's new in Silverlight 2 ? Eclipse support; changes in text rendering, controls, networking, Visual Studio support of ADO.NET Data Services, a font manager in Blend 2 SP1 and more.
Silverlight™ Dynamic Languages SDK - IronPython, IronRuby, and Managed JScript in Silverlight
Silverlight Tools RTW Released! - update for Silverlight Tools
Networking:
Unit Test Framework for Silverlight:
Tips:
Controls:
Books:
Others:
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