Microsoft details Silverlight upgrade plans

Microsoft's Silverlight rich internet application platform, which has been the subject of speculation lately about its future, will get a refresh next year when the company releases Silverlight 5.

The upgrade will feature such capabilities as 64-bit support and improvements in areas like high-definition video and digital rights management. Business application usage is a key focus for Silverlight 5. Overall, Silverlight 5 boasts more than 40 new features, according to Microsoft.

Recently, though, there has been confusion as to how much of a proirity Silverlight is for Microsoft. The company appeared to emphasize HTML5 while relegating Silverlight 5 to being primarily a platform for Windows Phone 7 application development. On the other hand, Microsoft has been stressing its commitment to the platform; Wednesday's announcement continues in that vein. 
"The main importance [of the announcement] is that [Silverlight 5 is] on the road map, it's coming, and Microsoft continues to show its ability to iterate with regard to Silverlight based on four major releases in three years," said analyst Ray Valdes of Gartner. He speculated Microsoft was offering Silverlight 5 details a bit early to quash any mixed messages about the company's commitment to the platform.

Silverlight is Microsoft's technology for "premium" application experiences, said Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft director of developer platforms. "It will deliver the best experience as possible," he said. The company will, however, also support HTML5 in its Internet Explorer 9 browser, enabling developers to leverage standards-based application capabilities. Silverlight is being positioned for use in desktop and Web applications, as well as Windows Phone applications.
Silverlight 5 is set for a beta release in the second quarter of 2011, with general availability set for the second half of next year. Microsoft is detailing five sets of improvements as being focused on business applications. Among these is a 64-bit support, which will improve performance and memory usage. Native 64-bit Silverlight plug-ins will be enabled for use on 64-bit hardware and 64-bit browsers, Goldfarb said.

Silverlight 5 also will feature a runtime and tools for better animation and layouts for user interfaces, he said. Developers can continue to use Microsoft's Visual Studio and Expression toolsets for building Silverlight applications. Improved graphics support, meanwhile, enables use of 3D capabilities for advanced business data visualization.

Communications and networking improvements include real-time capabilities to accommodate low-latency applications, such as a stock updating application. The fifth area geared to business applications is to enable developers to build a new class of trusted applications in which users can access their files and launch other desktop programs, such as Microsoft Word, from within Silverlight. This capability allows developers to build more traditional applications instead of just typical Web browser applications, Goldfarb explained.

Also for business application development, Model View ViewModel and data binding capabilities let more work be done more easily via XAML. Digital rights management improvements enable seamless switching between DRM media sources. Another capability on the docket for Silverlight 5 is the ability to host HTML content inside of a Silverlight application in a browser. "It gives developers more flexibility and choice," Goldfarb said.

Silverlight 5 will include capabilities for 1080D high-definition video on lower-end devices such as netbooks. Hardware decoding functionality capability will enable video playbacks via graphics processing units as opposed to CPUs. A capability called TrickPlay will allow video to be played at different speeds while supporting fast -forward and rewind, with audio pitch correction. 

Silverlight has had to vie with the more-established Adobe Flash rich Internet application platform and now, HTML5. But Goldfarb stressed the vitality of the technology, citing its use at prominent companies like NetFlix, eBay, SAP, and National Instruments.

Source:http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/development
/microsoft-details-silverlight-upgrade-plans 

Integrating Silverlight RIAs in SharePoint 2010 offers amazing opportunities to combine the power and flexibility offered by SharePoint with great user experiences. In fact, many interfaces shown in SharePoint 2010 are developed in Silverlight. Packt Enterprise wants to integrate Silverlight RIAs into SharePoint 2010. First, they must understand some of the fundamentals that are related to various tools and their configurations. In this chapter, they will cover many topics to help them understand the new tools and techniques involved in creating Silverlight RIAs for SharePoint 2010 sites. They will:

• Understand the benefits of integrating Silverlight with SharePoint
• Prepare the development environment to develop applications for SharePoint 2010 using Silverlight 4
• Prepare the SharePoint 2010 server to host Silverlight applications
• Create a Silverlight Line of Business RIA
• Learn to add a Silverlight RIA to a SharePoint site
• Understand the advantage of creating rich user experiences for SharePoint solutions
• Work with shared documents to store a Silverlight application in SharePoint sites
• Work with many Silverlight applications in a single page
• Learn the differences between client and server code

Source:http://www.deepmarket.com/technology/integrating-silverlight-4-with-sharepoint-2010-free-42-page-sample-chapter-2/

Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration

Silverlight is a web based technology, launched by Microsoft in April 2007. Silverlight is considered as a competitor to Adobe's Flash.Silverlight applications are delivered to browsers in a text-based markup language called XAML. One important difference between Flash and XAML is, Flash is a compiled application where as XAML is text based. Search engines can analyze and index such content, which is a huge benefit for webmasters.For regular internet users, Silverlight is a browser plug-in that supports video, audio and animations.For web developers, Silverlight offers much more. Silverlight supports video and audio files without need of much programming. It allows them to handle events from web pages .

//Vj (Netpeach Team)

SilverLight Referer Header:

Silverlight allows the Referer request header for both in-browser and out-of-browser scenarios on all networking requests used by WebClient and HttpWebRequest when they use the Client networking stack. This enables services like Live Mesh to determine where the requests originated. The Referer header is a request header field that is automatically set to the base URI of the client from which the Request-URI was obtained. The Referer request header allows a server to generate lists of back links to resources for logging and caching optimization.

//Vj (Netpeach Team)

DataGrid with Auto Sizing Columns In SilverLight.

The DataGrid now supports MouseWheel scrolling and the FlowDirection property. In addition, DataGrid supports row level copy. This means you can copy a row of a DataGrid to the clipboard and then paste it to another program.

//Vj (Netpeach Team)

Auto-Sizing columns of DataGrid in Silverlight

Silverlight added several new features to the DataGrid control. Through auto-sizing columns, the DataGrid in Silverlight now has the ability to allow columns to share the remaining width of a DataGrid. This feature makes it easy to define specific widths for some columns in a DataGrid while allowing the other columns to share the remaining width of the DataGrid. For example, you might want to have fixed widths for columns for City, State, and the Postal Code. However, you may want the Name column to use 1/3 of the remaining space and the Address column to use 2/3 of it. The following code would accomplish this using * column widths:

//Vj (NetpeachTeam)

 Silverlight Viewbox Control 

Silverlight adds the Viewbox to its list of layout containers. The Viewbox allows precise positioning and flexible resizing support that stretches or scales a single child element to fit the available space.  A Viewbox can only contain a single element.

The Viewbox’s StretchDirection property determines how to scale its contents. It prevents the contents of the Viewbox from being scaled to a smaller or larger dimension than the original. Possible values are UpOnly, DownOnly and Viewbox Control Both. The Stretch property determines how the content of the Viewbox will be stretched to fill the Viewbox. Possible values are None, Fill, Uniform, and UniformToFill.

The xaml code example  below shows a Viewbox control with the default settings of Stretch=Uniform and StretchDirection=Both. The image inside the Viewbox is 200x200 pixels and will be stretched uniformly to fill the entire smaller Viewbox. 

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Red" Width="100" 

Height="100" >

<Viewbox Margin="5">

        <Image Source="xxxxxx.png"/>

</Viewbox>

</Grid>

//Vj NetpeachTeam

RichTextBox Control

The RichTextBox has a Xaml property that supports serializing text content. You can get the Xaml from the RichTextBox’s Xaml property and save it to isolated storage or perhaps send it to a web service. You can also set the content of the RichTextBox control by setting the Xaml property. You can clear the content of a RichTextBox by calling the Blocks property’s Clear method.

//Vj (Netpeach Team)

RichTextBox Control

Silverlight adds the new RichTextBox control to the standard controls offered by Silverlight. Through the FlowDirection property, the RichTextBox has Bi-Directional(Bi-Di) support on content including Runs. It also allows hyperlinks, XAML content, embedding of images, changing the font size, foreground color, and making text bold, italicized, and underlined as well as many other rich text features. 

The RichTextBox supports the “format then type” feature. For example, with this feature you can choose a format, such as bold or font color of green, and when you start typing the formatting selections you made are applied to the text you type. Text position and selection APIs are also supported.

Another feature of the RichTextBox control is paragraph blocks, which allows different formatting of blocks of text. Built-in keyboard commands can be used to allow shortcuts for clipboard and undo operations. The RichTextBox also supports mouse events, XAML to clipboard features, undo, and language localization.

//Vijay Krishna(Netpeach Team)