Next Public Release of Silverlight is March

From reading Tim Sneath's blog. It seems that we won't be getting a new public release of Silverlight until March (Mix08).

On one hand this is great news, as we know what we can expect in March, we can get excited about Mix (convince my wife that i want to go), we will also get a non commerical go live license and it is a beta (so it will be pretty good).

The bad news, is that it seems that we won't be getting any more refreshes between now and then.

I am a little disappointed, as it was indicated at MixUK, that we would get a refresh by the end of this year, that gives us some of those features. I dounderstand that it is quite a big featureset change, and this stuff takes time. I guess I am just excited, and I want my presents now :)

Ah well. roll on March.

Mr Guthrie, is there any chance that we might get an earlier refresh???? Please, pretty please?

Finally for those cynics about Silverlight (the we have no controls brigade), this release is going to rock and you will be eating your own words.

Well done Microsoft, the transparency of release schedules is brilliant, and it really allows us to developers to plan for the future. Please keep it up.

:)

Silverlight 2.0

This is some big news via Microsoft Web Biggy Chieffy

Silverlight 1.1 becomes Silverlight 2.0 (yay, very sensible).

The big news in my opinion is that a beta will appear Quarter 1, 2008 including a Go Live license. This means we can start releasing Silverlight 2.0 enabled sites. Superb news.

Here is a subset of the features becoming available (copied from Scott Guthries blog):

"
WPF UI Framework: The current Silverlight Alpha release only includes basic controls support and a managed API for UI drawing. The next public Silverlight preview will add support for the higher level features of the WPF UI framework. These include: the extensible control framework model, layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, and control template and skinning support. The WPF UI Framework features in Silverlight will be a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in last week's .NET Framework 3.5 release.

Rich Controls: Silverlight will deliver a rich set of controls that make building Rich Internet Applications much easier. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for core form controls (textbox, checkbox, radiobutton, etc), built-in layout management controls (StackPanel, Grid, etc), common functionality controls (TabControl, Slider, ScrollViewer, ProgressBar, etc) and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, etc).

Rich Networking Support: Silverlight will deliver rich networking support. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for REST, POX, RSS, and WS* communication. It will also add support for cross domain network access (so that Silverlight clients can access resources and data from any trusted source on the web).

Rich Base Class Library Support: Silverlight will include a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). The next Silverlight preview release will also add built-in support for LINQ to XML and richer HTML DOM API integration."

Web Development Helper

Thanks to tim heuer for pointing me to the Web Development Helper Tool, please see my previous post.

I think in a world of AJAX, you need to be running an http sniffing utility. I have previously used Fiddler, but it isn't much use when you are working with https.

This tool is absolutely superb, and easily allows you to debug script, capture traffic, look at viewstate, the dom..........

What a great tool

HTTP Error 413 Request Entity too Large

We ran into this issue via AJAX.

To be honest this is on a legacy page, where we haven't created a new version of the page. So it a little data intensive.

This was a page where we used the telerik ajax framework rather than the Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax framework (which we try and use in most situations).

The problem with Telerik, if an issue happens the AjaxManager doesn't report the issue, and just goes into a little animation loop.

Using IEWatch we discovered that this situation occured only when we had had client certificates enabled with a certain size of data.

In the end our temporary resolve is to increase the upload limit:

cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/1/uploadreadaheadsize 204800

However you do need to be careful when doing this, and set approriate limits. The real resolve is to convert this legacy page so this issue doesn't occur, but this is a good temporary fix

IE Watch

This is a great little tool, it's a little like fiddler, but much better.

IE Watch is a toolbar option within IE, which allows you to view all requests, replay requests, and works properly with HTTPS. Fiddler doesn't seem to do so well with https in my humble opinion.

I used this on a 30 day eval (retails about $170), and it saved me alot of time.

My only complaint it is a little expensive, and I am willing to bet there are free alternatives, which are just as good.

I think these days, when dealing with AJAX requests, http packet sniffers are necessary. So I think I will investigate a free alternative.

DDD6 - Silverlight Samples

I have just posted up my samples for the Intro to Silverlight 1.1 and for the Silverlight Twitter Application.

As I have said in my previous posts, on the day I did not present the way I know I can, however I believe that the samples you have to download are good examples of what you can do with Silverlight.

Feel free to take these samples, expand upon them and build your own applications.

Over the coming weeks, I will be blogging about some of the stuff in the these samples, and some of the cool things you can do.

DDD - Stop showing me Silverlight, build something

Following on from my previous posts http://silverlightuk.blogspot.com/2007/11/ddd-intro-to-silverlight.html and http://silverlightuk.blogspot.com/2007/11/ddd-apology.html

This is my evaluation of what went wrong with this session:

• Rattled, and lost confidence (see previous post)
• Sitting down (i should never sit down)
• Tired and Lacked enthusiams (see previous post)
• Never practised this session enough
• Got lost in this session
• Too much code (confused the audience, and me), can't see wood for trees
• I got bored (if I am bored, you guys have no chance)
• Live Coding, and Reference apps were disconnected.
• Flow was wrong
• Not clear what bit of code i was working on

The real problems with this session, was due to the way i had structured this presentation, and how complicated, and ambitious I was.

Without comfort in the tools (for presenting purpose), and with a very different flow, everybody including me got rather lost.

I was boring, and unenthusiastic (due to the events leading upto this presentation).

I have some serious work to do on this, but I am pretty sure this will never happen again.

In future posts, I will discuss how i plan to rectify this in the future.