Silverlight Makes Version 3

Here we are at MIX ‘09, and like the past couple of MIX events, Silverlight, this time v3, has taken center-stage, and is promising to be a great platform for developing Rich Internet Applications, as well as now, the typical Line of Business Apps to power both consumer experiences and work experiences. It is often cited that Microsoft gets it in v3. V3 is an important milestone, and it certainly is for Silverlight.

Silverlight Progression

Indeed Silverlight which started out by focusing on being a scriptable graphics and media runtime in v1, and incorporated the CLR, controls, and a nice subset of managed code framework in v2 is growing up in v3 to become a full-fledged application platform. Several new features were highlighted during the keynote today:

 

• New Graphics and Media Capabilities – GPU support, perspective transforms, pixel shader effects, media smooth streaming, new codecs, including ability to write your own, better text rendering, etc.
• Data – new data controls, data-binding improvements, and validation
• Application model – ability to use library cache for reducing xap package sizes, better styling, capabilities
• Out-of-browser – ability to write apps that escape the browser chrome, run offline, and across platforms.
• Networking – besides offline/online notifications, support for binary serialization, server push and local connections (for communication across silverlight apps)

All this and more. Even better, Silverlight 3 is a tad bit smaller in size than Silverlight 2. I think Silverlight 3 is pretty much a no-brainer choice for developing a whole new set of experiences on the Web.

Other interesting stuff included tooling for creating Silverlight apps on the Mac using Eclipse as the IDE. The other big interesting announcement was around SketchFlow, an exciting new addition to the Expression line centered around sketching, prototyping, collecting feedback, and the coolest part – the ability to transform some of your early work into an start for the real application.

Microsoft Ajax 4.0 Preview 4

The Microsoft Ajax team made the fourth preview of the 4.0 version available on CodePlex. This is an important release because it enables the full client data story, complete with the ability to get changes back to the server automatically.

 

Here’s a quick recap of some of the available features:

 

• Getting a client representation of data from an ADO.NET and REST data service.
• Rendering data on the client using templates.
• Declarative instantiation of client components.
• Live bindings, enabling changes in the UI and in the data to be automatically propagated.
• Command bubbling for codeless wiring of events in template-driven controls.
• Data identity and association management for efficient and consistent client-server data exchanges.
• Sending changes back to ADO.NET and REST data services.

In a nutshell, it is probably the easiest way to build a data-driven client application.

Enterprise Library 4.1 released

Don’t forget to download Enterprise Library 4.1, which was recently released by Microsoft Patterns & Practices.

The Microsoft Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable application blocks designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges. This following application blocks are included: Caching Application Block, Cryptography Application Block, Data Access Application Block, Exception Handling Application Block, Logging Application Block, Policy Injection Application Block, Security Application Block, Validation Application Block, and Unity Application Block.

This release includes:

• Support for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1.
• Interception mechanism in the Unity Application Block.
• Performance improvements.
• Usability improvements of the config tool.
• Fixes

Download Enterprise Libary 4.1 here.

Silverlight – Developer Reference Posters

Today I found two posters of Silverlight, given below.

Google like autocomplete suggestions

I like Google’s suggest feature and was thinking of using it in any of my project. ASP.NET’s AJAX Control Toolkit have a similar control (AutoCompleteExtender) which provides a basic items to complete this functionality. I searched about its usage, and found many examples, but I was not satisfied with them. They all were populating only a single field using this extender.

I then came up with an idea, why not fill a contacts detail including its name, email address, and phone numbers using just one extender, but without modifying any provided functionality, so that our code be used with newer versions. Below is what it will look after populating that contact form.

Type.GetType()

Browsing through ASP.NET Forums, I found an interesting questions raised by a member that when he tried to get type information of a class using Type.GetType it was a charm in C#, but VB did not worked in same manners. He was trying to create new instances of that class at runtime, and populate those instances with data fetched from any database.

how div is drawn

In IE5 and IE6

1. A div is rectangular.
2. Only one corner of a div can be absolutely positioned on a page.
3. The location of the diagonally opposing corner must be determined by the width and height of the div.
4. The width and height can be determined using dynamic properties.

In all other browsers:

1. A div is rectangular.
2. All four corners of a div can be absolutely positioned on a page.
3. If the location of diagonally opposing corners has been determined, the width and height is implied.

AJAX: Selecting the Framework that Fits

Today I was just wandering on the net, and found a very good article on AJAX framework selection by Andrew Turner and Chao Wang.

See Details

Disabled ASPX Controls on client side

To enable or disable .Net controls on client side use following scripts.

//To Disable
document.getElementById(element_client_id).setAttribute('disabled','true');

//To Enable
document.getElementById(element_client_id).removeAttribute('disabled');

Nearly all html rendered control would adher to this coding guide, but aspx checkbox has a span element wrapped up on it. To disable checkbox properly add a extra line as below.

document.getElementById(element_client_id).parentElement.removeAttribute('disabled');