PAARC: Milestone Reached NuGet: little known features

Updated all my Silverlight 5 posts

Published on Sunday, December 11, 2011 11:25:00 AM UTC in Programming

Now that the final version of Silverlight 5 is released, I've gone through all my posts and articles that were based on the beta or RC version and updated the code or text where applicable. I've also fixed links so they now point to the final documentation. As a convenience, I have compiled a complete list of the changes I've made - which gives you an idea what has changed in the final release compared to the beta/RC versions.

The "Silverlight 5 Tidbits" mini series

Implicit Data Templates

This feature works the same as in the pre-releases.

Multi-Column Layouts

Compared to the beta version, really a lot has changed here, including the involved type names. Instead of rich text boxes and overflows, this has been changed to rich text blocks. A lot of the things that originally were in my post (like modifying the style to remove the rich text box behavior etc.) became obsolete by these changes.

Markup Extensions

Markup Extensions work the same as in the pre-release versions. Unfortunately that means that the same limitations are also still in place, in particular no support for positional arguments. I also still seem to get complaints by the XAML parser a lot when I use custom Markup Extensions (although they're completely valid and run perfectly).

Multiple Windows

I'm pleased to say that a lot of the problems I ran into with multiple windows in Silverlight 5 out of browser applications are now fixed. For example, you can now freely position the main window on the screen, and in the same way the weird arbitrary restrictions on windows sizes have been removed. Unfortunately, some of the issues are still in place, in particular Silverlight's limitations to work with multiple monitors.

Trusted applications

The general process and steps required to set up in-browser trusted applications are still the same as in the pre-release versions of Silverlight 5. Some of the UI bits have been straightened, so the post has been updated to reflect this.

Incremental Search

This feature works the same as in the pre-releases.

Data Binding

All the new features shown there work the same in the final release.

Other posts

Fixing the Housebuilder sample

This application by John Papa is still a popular sample used by people to explore the 3D capabilities of Silverlight. The issues I discovered there are not directly related to core Silverlight, but bugs in the way the sample is implemented. The fixes provided there are still valid and confirmed to be necessary for those who work with a different culture setting than en-US.

Quick Tip: 64-bit Support

The download links for the final release of Silverlight 5 do not contain 64-bit runtimes for Mac OSX anymore (maybe they'll follow later?). However, on Windows the tip is still valid, and the updated links now point to the correct installer packages.

PInvoke Fun - System Font Dialog

This sample still works for the final release of Silverlight 5 and should be a nice tutorial for everyone who wants to learn about PInvoke with Silverlight, and the particular restrictions and limitations you have to work around. I would've loved to see some of the missing memory allocation and conversion functions be added to the final release, but it's still possible to work around that in the way demonstrated here.

Tags: Silverlight · Silverlight 5