Silverlight 3: The WPFification of RIA  

Sunday, March 22 2009

It's 5am on a Saturday. Yeah, RIA will do that to a person. Regardless, there are several things I'm catching up on from MIX '09 in Vegas that make me just think: *finally*. Here's a short list of what should have been in SL 2.0:

  1. ElementName Bindings (but where's RelativeSource={RelativeSource, FindAncestor ...} ?)
  2. <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>. It was impossible to manage complex resources/assets without this.
  3. PixelShaders. I know it's a .NET 3.5 SP1 Feature, but so awesome.
  4. <Style BasedOn={x:Null} />, BasedOn styles are an improvement, but in my opinion just the poor cousin of cascading styles. CSS concepts in a WPF/Silverlight application would be so welcome.
  5. Silverlight on the desktop. I mean Telesto can run anywhere right? Does this mean I'll see an Android port of Moonlight 3.0 *fingers crossed*?

That's enough speculation for now. I'll save the rest for the comments.

Update: Apparently RelativeSource is supported in Silverlight 3, see here for more details.


  • Posted by Charlie Robbins

Comments

Daniel said on Sunday, March 22, 2009:

Charlie:

RelativeSource is supported in Silverlight 3: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.data.binding.relativesource(VS.96).aspx

It was the first thing I looked for, too.

Colin E. said on Monday, March 23, 2009:

Hi Charlie, I think that people who learn Silverlight on its own are very pleased with the API. It is those of us who have come to Silverlight via WPF who moan a lot! By the way, yes, SL3 has RelativeSource binding but only RelativeSource.Self and TemplatedParent. If you want FindAncestor .. you will have to do it yourself: http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/blog/wpf/2009/02/relativesource-binding-in-silverlight/ And CSS for Silverlight? I have had a go at WPF … http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/blog/wpf/2009/03/using-css-selectors-for-styling-in-wpf/ I quite like the way it feels - CSS for Silverlight is next on the list. Colin E.

Charlie said on Monday, March 23, 2009:

@Colin, I saw your post about CSS Selectors in WPF, interesting work. I’d really like to see how that could work in WPF. I always find that I am creating very narrowly scoped Styles for my design time elements.

@Daniel, Colin is right, FindAncestor is missing in the documentation page that you supplied. Nice use of Attached Properties to get it working Colin!

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