Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

Microsoft have a great Hands-on lab that deals with partitioning of your Silverlight application.

Quote:

Partitioning Your Silverlight Application for Deployment
This lab will demonstrate a technique within Silverlight 2 to enable you to partition your application into different deployment packages. This will enable your application to only use what it needs, when it needs it and provide an experience to the user and improve overall download times for your application. This lab walks through a simple example of separating details view information from the main portion of the Silverlight application.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/0/c/70cb966a-1b68-4123-9b48-b0eaa1086104/SL2B2-HOL-AppPartitioning.pdf

This all works really well until you add in some Service References to WCF end points.  You will end up with an error like

Martin Grayson has a fantastic post, along with code, on one of the best Fish Eye controls I’ve seen implemented. 

Fish Eye for the Blend Guy

Using this as a basis we have been working on migration to Silverlight,  and finally got the time to get this working.

The code is still a bit rough so I can’t publish it,  but it does demonstrate that it can be done.   The main changes we needed to make were due to the lack of a Mouse position meaning we needed to pass this into the methods from our MouseOver event.   We also needed to create StoryBoards on the fly for the animation,  I have some concerns here about memory usage as we’re currently not cleaning everything up – more work needed

Screen shot below,  actual examples to follow soon.

Click the image to see an animated version (400KB).

Silverlight seems to have had a new wave of interest with Microsoft releasing the Silverlight BluePrint for SharePoint.  The code will be made available for download on Wed 5th March.

I do like the look of Silverlight and think it can help to make us think about our UI in a different way.   Adobe Flash and Flex do a similar thing but the marketing machine that is Microsoft will ensure that everyone knows what Silverlight is and can do,  not just the techies.

I would like to see Microsoft put the effort in to cover all of the platforms and ensure that Silverlight is installed everywhere.   I’m looking forward to doing some more Silverlight development,  it just looks so cool