Silverlight - Take Two

[Vitoc]

A while back when Silverlight 1.1 went Alpha I decided I was going to kick the tires and give it a go.  The resulting chain of events was probably one of the least enjoyable experiences I?ve had as a developer.  The installation process to actually be able to create Silverlight applications was horrid.  Part of the issue was Microsoft decided to start naming files with double extensions like ?blah.html.js? which is a red flag for AVG and likely other virus protection.  This prevents you from even creating a Silverlight project using the Silverlight project template.  Btw, this took a good hour to figure out because the error message just says ?Access Denied? and you?re stuck Googling it.  Even after figuring that out and getting into my first Hello World app, I was immediately shocked by the lack of any meaningful controls.  No grids, no buttons, no labels? the only thing useful to me that they had were a TextBlock and Rectangles.  They didn?t allow cross domain calls with their WebRequest object which immediately ruled out consuming any web resources from anywhere other than your own site, and in fact requests to your own domain had to be made on port 80.  Not being able to open a socket was a real turnoff to me.  I pushed forward though and built a little application that showed the status of people?s characters in GreaterMUD.  Not two months later people started telling me my app wasn?t working for them.  Turns out Microsoft shit-canned Silverlight 1.1 altogether and decided to push forward with 2.0; you literally can?t find 1.1 anywhere on the internet.  I spent several frustrating hours getting everything set up, several more working with their primitive tools, managed to get something kind of cool up and running, and then they pulled the rug out from underneath me.

Silverlight 2.0 is out now, and how dumb am I for thinking they?d have all this crap worked out?  VS2008 has a Silverlight project which still chokes with some antivirus programs (AVG for example).  After figuring a workaround you still don?t have any controls.  I found a VS2008 Silverlight Tools download which upon running let me know I didn?t have the right version of VS2008 SP1 installed.  I went ahead and installed the version of SP1 they recommended and was forced to reboot after completion.  I then tried installing the Silverlight tools and near the very end I was greeted by a ?fatal error? message accompanied with a long log file that was full of messages that didn?t tell me squat about why it failed.  I figured maybe enough of it had installed that I could at least use the controls.  Not only are the controls still not there, but now several key Silverlight assemblies are completely missing, so everything under the System.Windows namespace is kaput, including the Canvas class which is comparable to the Page class for ASP.NET web applications; an absolutely essential class.

I?ve been working with .NET since the beta days of 1.0.  I?ve had great experiences with 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and 3.0/3.5 and have had very few problems with every version of Visual Studio for .NET I?ve used, other than our wonderful TFS experiences.  I really, really, *really* want to give Silverlight a shot, but Microsoft couldn?t have made it any more difficult if they had tried.

[Gardner Denver]

I don't guess you'd want to hear that Microsoft sent out an update for Silverlight via their automatic updates around 2am today huh?