Scott Guthrie: Building a Silverlight 2 application

I was very pleased to see (as mentioned in this video) that with the release of Silverlight 2, after installing it the user no longer has to close and relaunch their web browser as they had to do with the betas--well done!

One point of confusion for me is the Silverlight.js file: I am not using it and the beta 2 silverlight project I created didn't include it, but when I created a released silverlight 2 project, Visual Studio created this file and referenced it in the test html page it generated.  Should I add this file as-is to my server files and include the reference to it in my html page?

Edit: I asked the above question on the silverlight.net forum and got an answer for it (in no time flat!).

Great job Microsoft team!  Developing my game in silverlight was an excellent experience.

Great video.  It really shows how easy Silverlight 2 is if you know your way around WPF.  Assuming cross-platform support (Mac? Linux?) this is easily a Flash-killer.

One request though - can you please make a 64-bit Silverlight viewer?  I don't like having to switch over to 32-bit IE7/8 when I come across a site that uses Flash or Silverlight.

Thanks for the video Scott and Dan.
 
I wish Silverlight could have been announced with a blog post and video for the community rather then the Microsoft PR Press release -Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2  on the 13th then Silverlight 2 Released on the 14th and now the video follows on the 15th

Any ETA on the RTW version of the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1?  I've searched the Download Center and could only come up with the RC1 drop (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C22D6A7B-546F-4407-8EF6-D60C8EE221ED).

Joe:  they are released, http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

-- no I am wrong .... that does show an rc1 version....  but it is released 10/13 so it is the most current release.
so it is the one to use with the RTW bits of Silverlight and VS 08 SP1.

cool stuff

got some questions though,
now that thr dlr and iron ruby/python is released (right?) how do you use it with regular apps? im pretty sure you can but i whould love to see some info on that

also, is silverlight really a compatible subset of wpf now? can i take my silverliht xaml and plop it into a desktop app and it will just work? how much stuff do i have to modify?

how about data/event triggers? i heard somewhere that silverlight didnt support all the trigger stuff that wpf supported, whats the difference there?

last one , is the visual state manager availible in regular wpf? if not, will it?

Hi aL_,

Silverlight is in some ways a "compatible subset" of WPF, but in other ways it is not.  You will most likely have to modify your XAML and backing code if they are of any complexity.  The way you setup and run animations are different, data templates differ, many functions and properties available in WPF classes are not available in the corresponding Silverlight classes, etc.

I ported my Silverlight app (a game) to WPF and it took about 3 hours of fiddling.  Going the other way (WPF to Silverlight) can be much more difficult because you may be using a feature of WPF that has no direct Silverlight equivalent and have to do a workaround.

I don't know the specifics about differences in triggers and the visual state manager availability.  It would be great for Microsoft to publish a comprehensive diff of WPF classes/functions/properties and Silverlight.  Right now the only way I know is to search MSDN for the WPF class then do the same with the Silverlight version and compare what is available, or use intellisense in the code!

Very very good video! Clear and simple.

As more interesting libraries become available for Silverlight... like additional control libraries...

I see that existing controls are in the 100's KB large, which isn't bad if you had a fast internet connection, but could be annoying to users when their apps just freeze for a few seconds.

Is there a way to tie into Silverlight assembly loading events so that we give prompts / progress reporting on assembly downloading?

Or can Silverlight do this automatcally for devs?

P.S.
I hate .Net 2.0 new async pattern. I much prefer the BeginCalling(MyCallback);

Because you're doing the same thing w/

proxy.Callback += MyCallback;
proxy.MakeAsyncCall

If you do MakeAsyncCall again somewhere else, you have to be cognizant of what's in Callback now. I much prefer to provide explicitly a callback for each async call.

P.P.S.
Thank you! Finally, automatic UI thread sync!

P.P.P.S.
Speaking of blogging... One of the Silverlight evangelists I follow is Tim Sneath. He did announce SL2, but the post prior to that one was a full month ago. What's up w/ that?

Thanks folks.  This is nice if you know the object model, but not having designer support in VS really makes this cumbersome to use and learn - at least for me.  vs still seems to have issues with readonly render in the designer.  Is there any expected time on vs sl tools to have read/write sl support?