What’s going on in RIA World ?

This blog post I am starting with one bad news..and news is that Microsoft Popfly Service (Remember Popfly? We use to create Jazzy Mashups and small cool games, I even wrote one post on it in past http://pendsevikram.blogspot.com/2008/06/microsoft-popfly-step-by-step.html ) is now closing down soon in August.

Well not to worry much about it. I made few posts on Silverlight 3 since it was in Beta version, In my last post I give out the links to download Silverlight SDK and tools so that you can get ready with Silverlight 3 environment. I am in process to write separate series of article for Blend 3 and Sketch Flow,mostly in next week.

Breaking Changes in Silverlight !

Few of my friends already breaking their head because of breaking changes ! :P

Today,to start with let us just discuss what all new things there with the Silverlight 3 RTW build, and then as usual we will go deep down for each one, I believe in experimenting few things and not just push to public..so my post are sometimes comes late to your side, well I take my own time :)

Out of Browser : Revamped !

Following statements if you are using to check if application is running offline :

if(App.Current.RunningOffline){} will not work with new bits.

App.Current.RunningOffline is now replaced by App.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser

Same story for App.Current.Detach(), its now App.Current.Install(), This is also given us new event to handle as InstallStateChanged. Also in addition to this, the old way of configuring of AppManifest.xaml for Out of Browser is now revamp with a separate Configuration Window under Visual Studio and can be access as Project –> Project Properties like this :

Note : “Reduce XAP Size” and “Enable Out of Browser” not goes together hand in hand. Why ? ..we are discussing this in our upcoming post.

Also I am keeping my shut on Application.Current.CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync(); Since very soon I will write a separate post on it which will cover all this breaking changes.

System.Web.Silverlight : R.I.P !

From Silverlight 3 SDK, You will not see <asp:Silverlight/> and <asp:MediaPlayer/> inside your hosting ASP.NET Page. Microsoft now recommends you to use <object> tag (We already have that in our HTML Hosting sample pages,isn’t it? ..Guys this reminds me to search for HTML 5 and keep looking progress of the same, They say its new revolution on Web !, make sure you use Bing and not Google ! :P )

Some of our close Control friends are moved : Silverlight Toolkit !

Following Controls are now part of Silverlight Toolkit :

• DockPanel


• WrapPanel


• Expander


• ViewBox


• DataForm

Some more features with Silverlight 3 in short :

• Supports Browser Zoom


• Supports Multitouch


• Supports Matrix Projection


• Supports Mouse Wheel event


• New analytics class to identify CPU usage and usage by SL


• Clear Type Support

So these are few Highlighted features of newly launched Silverlight 3 RTW bits, Don’t get panic, We will explore them one by one in much more depth.

New DeepZoom Composer !

New DeepZoom is now available for download with exciting new features of Tag ( In past I have already talked about usage of DeepZoom, still same method is carried to this version,so you can refer my old blog post http://pendsevikram.blogspot.com/2008/07/deep-zoom-with-silverlight-2.html ). You can set now Tags to images easily.

By choosing Export option as “Tag Browser” you will get output like this : (Very excellent look and also easily pluggable in App)

Enjoy !!..So..That’s all about Silverlight 3 new stuff and breaking changes, soon I will be talking on SketchFlow and then again Silverlight 3 but not overview but with deep insight..so keep looking at this place for much more new stuff !

Vikram.