The last 3 months I was writing a couple of smaller Silverlight apps. Coming coming from WPF I have to admit is is similar but still so different.
They really stripped it down. So what do I really miss:
- No Binding to UI Elements in XAML (this really sucks...). I found a work around to bind to a State class, but it is not as elegant
- No {DynamicResource}. Only Static. This also really sucks. No skin change on the fly possible.
- No Event Triggers (e.g. onMouse over,...) but in SL2B2 they at least have the Visual State Manager
- Debugging is a pain in the whatever....
But I have to admit besides all these missing parts I think it is the right way to go. It is just lighter than WPF and the IDE is faster (at least on my machine)... It just is a stronger focus on the UI.
But enough of whining... let's look at the cool new features: Visual State Manager (VSM)
This is what will also replace all the UI-Triggers in WPF in the next version. And it integrates "smoothly" into Blend. I am not a big fan of Blend (I just love coding in XAML - like good old html days) but even I have to admit for a first beta version it is really really impressive!
I think the best article which is a must about the VSM is from one of the Developer of Silverlight:
http://scorbs.com/work
She has a 4 part series about VSM. If you plan to use WPF or Silverlight in the future => READ IT !!!!!!!!
This will save you lots of pain when you look at Blend code.
So that's it for today. I guess in the next blogs I will focus more on snippets and pain in the whatever (pitw) of my daily life with Silverlight
All the best to all you geeks
Tom