How is it Day 6 already?
Anyway things are progressing along fairly nicely. Except when developing in Silverlight I need to still bear in mind that it is still beta so there are still some rough edges.
My top complaints so far:
1) No dropdownlist.
This is a huge omission, better be fixed in the upcoming release or I’ll be going round Balmer’s house to complain.
Workaround: Currently just using listboxes in the UI.
2) Can’t disable controls.
Another strange omission, seems like a standard requirement. You can make them not visible but not disable them like Windows controls
Workaround: Quick and nasty hack is to drop the opacity to 0.5 and check on the click event whether it should fire.
3) Can’t modify UI on other thread
At least I think that’s the problem, haven’t looked to much into this one. I was trying to alter a shape on a timer callback thread, but access violation exceptions were getting thrown.
Workaround: Move the main animation loop into the control. In fact for what I was looking to get done, a storyboard is probably a better option
The great thing about Silverlight is that I can code in C# and just have an application run on the web. The main new thing to learn in XAML which is a declarative markup for the visuals. MS Blend is program provided by Microsoft to help with the development of Silverlight front-ends. Potentially they have a really nice split between designers and coders with this. VS.Net is somewhat lacking currently in the visual design of Silverlight (i.e. you can’t do anything!). However unlike Blend it has intellisense where you can directly edit the XAML and see the result in real-time. I find myself flicking between Blend and VS.Net.
