The Coding Humanist

So I downloaded the new Silverlight 2.0 goodies and have played around with them a little. If you're using the Blend 2.5 preview, here's a tip. When you create a TextBlock it creates a TextBlock then puts the text in a Run element inside it. Afterwards, if you change the font size it changes it on the TextBlock and not the Run, and the changes don't affect the actual text. To fix this annoying bug, take the Text property of the Run and put it into the parent TextBlock element and delete the Run. After that you should be good to go.

Silverlight is a new offering for developers that Microsoft is currently working on. Right now Silverlight 1.0 it is still in beta. Essentially, think Flash, except better. At least that's the general idea. For more info, I would start with the Microsoft page for Silverlight. Chances are, though, that if you're here, you know about it. But just in case, there you go.

So I had a nice solution to the problem caused by the mix of Silverlight, Firefox, Xhtml doctype, and inline xaml. But they changed the API, so that no longer works. I'll have a new workaround soon. Ah, the fun of working with a CTP...

I had to update my little article on the issue with Silverlight on Firefox using inline Xaml with an Xhtml doctype. Luis Miguel Abreu responded to an inquiry I made about it on the msdn forums and, frankly, his solution was better. So I updated the article and added his approach to the download. But, I'm still looking for alternatives if anyone has a good one...

You know, just typing out this issue is tedious. This problem is really easy to have, even though four conditions have to be met. But since most developers who deal with Silverlight probably run Firefox at least sometimes, and because an Xhtml doctype is the default for VS 2005, and because inline Xaml would be something that would probably be done often. It's a mouthful, but I'm guessing more and more people will have this problem. We need to have as much out on the web to help them out.

So as I've played around with Silverlight the last few days, I've found a problem. It is supposedly an issue with Firefox, where Firefox doesn't parse some elements correctly when the doctype is set to Xhtml. Essentially, if you have Xaml inlined for Silverlight in a page, if the page has an Xhtml doctype, and you're using Firefox, Silverlight will not work for you. This is a problem...

I was quite irked today when I came across this. I did a little searching and found a little discussion on this in the MSDN Forums. The proposal was to remove the Xhtml doctype. That proposal doesn't sit well with me. I don't like the idea of changing a doctype just because a browser has a bug. So, I came up with my own proposal for dealing with this situation. It is more work than just removing the doctype, but I think it is a better solution regardless. Any suggestions or critiques are welcomed.

Silverlight is a new offering (it is still a CTP as of this writing of this) from Microsoft. You can find its home here. Silverlight is a cross-browser and cross-platform browser plugin for richer media/graphics on the web. Put more simply, think Flash. Many call it Microsoft's "Flash killer". We'll have to wait and see if that turns out to be true. Back in the early days of my tech life I was a Flash monkey, back in the Flash 5 and Flash MX era. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Then I started using Visual Studio. I was totally hooked, and have been since. At my job we started looking into porting our main application from a windows-based program to a Flash-based web application. I am sure I would have loved it in my pre-Visual Studio days, but going from the nice application design IDE of Visual Studio to the not very nice application design interface of Flash was painful. The Flash interface was excellent for making graphics, little games, and interactive tidbits, but trying to write a real application on that platform with Actionscript was not pleasant. I ended up moving on and to this day I am still very glad I didn't have to spend too much time doing app development in Flash.

My hope is that Silverlight will be able to fill that gap. I've already had some experience with Xaml working on Thrius, and I am quite impressed with Xaml. Maybe we'll soon see the full capabilities of Silverlight as more documentation comes out and we get closer to release. I'm still an ASP.NET junkie and Silverlight will not replace ASP.NET development for me, but it might just give me some capabilities that I didn't have before.

I'm sure Flash is better for app dev now than it used to be. I'm pretty sure Adobe is working on that. But if Silverlight turns out to be good, then I don't need to think hard about getting back into Flash. As of today I've spent about 8 hours messing around with it, so I can't know yet how good this is going to be.