Response Chain
Silverlight 3 Wish List
What RDN Readers want in the next version of Silverlight.
Scott Guthrie, Microsoft corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division, released early details in November of what we can expect from the next version of Silverlight. Readers speak up on what they'd really like to see.
My Silverlight most-wanted:
1. Client-side printing
2. Client-side printing
3. Client-side printing
Michael Hennessy
President, Networkers Inc.
Manchester, Conn.
One key function of a line-of-business [LOB] application is reporting. Once users prepare a report they inevitably want to print it. I can hack printing of a report using ASP.NET in a pop-up window, assuming I can get around the pop-up blockers. Direct printing support is essential for writing LOB applications, all the more so because Silverlight is all about user experience.
Sal Razzaq
Principal Engineer, Irdeto Access B.V.
Carlsbad, Calif.
A huge item for us is making Silverlight more compatible with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Yes, Microsoft did an exceptional job of keeping the Silverlight download small, but at what cost?
The cost is that none of our WPF code runs on Silverlight. Further, it's not trivial to port it. We made a significant investment in learning WPF, thinking all the knowledge would transfer over to Silverlight. Certainly some of it does, but we find that coding for the two environments is too different. They ripped out too much from .NET.
Realistically, if the download went from 4.5MB to 10MB, would anyone care? I think not. Microsoft over-prioritized -- by a huge margin -- the importance of the tiny download.
Mike Castillo
Software Architect, Gold Systems Inc.
Boulder, Colo.