Silverlight 2.0 - Advantages, Limitations & Tools
- Advantages of Silverlight:
- Rich UI applications using WPF (similar to Desktop applications)
- Cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in
- Rich Media experience. Possible to collaborate Media objects such as Video Streaming, Animations, etc.
- Search-engine friendly
- Application is firewall-compatible
- Socket/TCP programming for multi-player networking support
- Overlaying of Silverlight controls is possible as each Silverlight components is rendered in HTML DIV tags.
Limitations:
- No support for auto-content scrolling of a container.
- Silverlight 1.0 : Doesn't include any input controls of its own. If you need user input in your Silverlight controls, you either need to create the control manually via XAML layout and event handling (for key and mouse events, etc.) or you can use HTML controls for capturing input and passing the content to the Silverlight control. Silverlight 2.0 allows this.
- Silverlight 2.0 :
- The relative positing is not currently supported in Silverlight (Fix: we need to specify the Canvas.Top for each and every controls.)
- Debugging with Firefox browser is not so good: VS 2008 can't attach the firefox automatically when we run the application. so, we have to manually attach the firefox browser from Visual Studio.
- Exception handling is not very good so far: Exceptions in XAML file do not show on the browsers and it will just show the emply canvas which is not good.
- No build-in silverlight controls available in Silverlight Alpha.
- The support of WPF is currently very limited.
Tools:
- Visual Studio 2008 : Writing C# code
- Expression Design : To Convert a design into its XAML file.
- Expression Blend : For designing purpose.
- Silverlight 2.0 SDK : Help
- Silverlight Tools for VS : VS2008 extensions.
Best Practices:
Look out for the best practices on:
