I have a Silverlight application running across many different locations. I want to upgrade to Silverlight 5 but unfortunately several of our large sites have antiquated IT departments that are dragging their feet on the upgrade. They're telling me it's going to be at least 4-6 months before than can be running Silverlight 5. What I'm wondering is this: Can I build a Silverlight 4 version of my XAP and a Silverlight 5 version of my XAP and then load the correct version based on which version of the Silverlight client is running on the machine accessing my site.
Is this even possible? I've searched around and I didn't see anything pointing me in the right direction so I came here.
Thanks
It's certainly possible to choose to load a different XAP depending on the version of the Silverlight plugin the user has. The key is to use the Silverlight.isInstalled JavaScript function.
You'll need to make a couple of small modifications to the HTML used to display your Silverlight application:
add an ID such as id="slObj" to your Silverlight <object ...> element.
remove the element <param name="source" value="...">. The value of this parameter will be determined at runtime by JavaScript.
Once you've done that, you can call a function such as the following to load the correct Silverlight application. I've assumed your Silverlight HTML <object> element has an id of slObj:
function loadCorrectSilverlightXAP() {
var slObj = document.getElementById("slObj");
if (Silverlight.isInstalled("5.0.0.0")) {
slObj.source = "URLOfMySilverlight5App.xap";
} else {
slObj.source = "URLOfMySilverlight4App.xap";
}
}
Related
I have been using Excel VBA and WPF applications to scrape data from various websites, and all has gone well. But now I have run into something I cant get past.
The website is displaying its data within a Silverlight control:
<OBJECT width="100%" height=400 id=rnSilverlightGrid
data="data:application/x-oleobject;base64,QfXq3+...blah blah thousands of characters...AAAA=="
type=application/x-silverlight-2
</OBJECT>
(Left out what I thought was not helpful.)
getElementById("rnSilverlightGrid") returns nothing, but I am able to get a handle to the object with ie.document.all.tags("Object").Item(0), but have been unable to go further into the object to get data.
Can anyone tell me how now to get the data out of this Silverlight grid? This is currently coded in Excel VBA, but if necessary I can switch to WPF and use the WebBrowser control. I would rather not make the switch if avoidable (not sure how to do it there either anyways). I looked into White (seems like a dead end), and have seen other questions about this which have gone unanswered.
Thanks in advance!
Silverlight has the capability to make certain objects available to JavaScript calls so that JavaScript developers can affect the Silverlight application externally.
These are called "Scriptable Objects".
further reading: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645085(v=vs.95).aspx
My understanding is that this feature is available in SL4 and SL5.
The requirement is below:
--> The version of Silverlight is 3.0
--> I don’t want to convert it to jpg, png etc. since I want end user to copy data from the displayed data.
--> I am currently using IFrame to display pdf but it has some problems like IFrame not supported consistently across different browsers.
--> I could not find any control (third party) that displays pdf with SL 3.0 Most of the controls that I came across are either for 4.0 or does conversion into some png kind of format which doesn’t allow user to copy data. If there is nothing that can be done from SL easily then I am ready to use 3rd party controls that are meant to work with SL 3.0 and allow end user to copy data.
--> I thought about reading data from pdf and displaying again over some control like text block but this would eventually become complicated for scenarios where I have to maintain formatting and displaying images etc.
Please suggest on this.
I think you gonna lose this one. I don't know of anything that renders PDF well in Silverlight 4 let alone Silverlight 3.
Whilst this comment "IFrame not supported consistently across different browsers" may be true IFrame is generally supported by the all major browsers.
Hence your best bet is to test and tweak your IFrame solution with these browsers.
Alternatively launch an independent browser window to display the PDF or let the users local system use whatever it has installed to display the PDF.
I have a simple Silverlight app that I want to run on Windows Phone 7 almost exactly as is. I've created a new Windows Phone 7 project and when I reference the Silverlight app I get a warning that says "Adding a reference to a Silverlight project might not work properly. Do you want to continue?".
If I continue and try to run anyway, the WP7 project never starts or sometimes I get "AG_E_PARSER_BAD_TYPE error" and it points to the line in the xaml I used a control from the Silverlight project .
The code between these two projects is about 99% the same. Is there another way to reuse code then what I am trying? Or how can I get this to work?
I'm not that familiar with the difference between the two platforms, but you can link the code files into a different project without duplicating them. Add existing item, and click on the down arrow next to the 'Add' or OK button. Choose Link.
The typical way of achieving this is by using a pattern like MVVM which will allow you to define a common model and viewmodel layer (perhaps in a separate project) the defining a different view layer that references that common project.
You said it yourself, you will only share MOST of the code, not all of it, so you will, at least at some time, need to create device/front-end specific logic and layout.
Rather than add a Silverlight [presumably class library] project to your WP7 app, try creating a WP7 class library and then link the files from the silverlight library. You will still only have one copy of each file but all your libraries will be built appropraitely for the platform they are running on.
This may also help you identify the cause of the problem. The error AG_E_PARSER_BAD_TYPE suggests that you have a type in the XAML in your Silverlight project which isn't supported on the phone.
Quick intro: I have some Silverlight 1 content that people have been editing and putting into HTML pages. Unfortunately, this means a lot of repetative creation of Storyboards, etc. We can use Silverlight 2, but not everyone here is familiar with C#/has Visual Studio. What I would like to do is create some custom controls in C#, output to a DLL, then reference the DLL in the XAML file (just as if it was part of a Silverlight project in VS).
I've tried adding this:
xmlns:mycontrol="clr-namespace:MyControl;assembly=../../content_GLOBAL/controls/MyControl/MyControl"
in the Grid tag that is my root. I know the path to MyControl.dll is correct. When I actually try and use it, though (I add <mycontrol:MyControl></mycontrol:MyControl> to the grid) and I get a parser error. It all seems OK if I don't add the control, even if I leave in the xmlns.
I suppose on some level, this makes sense--looking for an assembly is useful if you are going to build something, and since this XAML isn't in VS, it isn't actually building anything. Is there another way that I can reference, and use a custom control in SL2 in a stand-alone XAML file?
Let me first make sure that I understand you correctly: You have a Silverlight app that doesn't use any managed code and is not packaged in a .xap file. The <object> tag refers to a loose xaml file.
This is the Silverlight 1 app model and can still be used in SL 2, and such apps are referred to as "v1-style apps" (even though they target SL 2 and may use features not present in v1). When an application in this form is used, the Silverlight plugin does not load any of the managed components of the runtime (e.g. the CLR, etc.), so referencing a dll from a v1 style app is not going to work.
However, there might be work-arounds to the challenge you are facing here. One solution might be to use a v2 style app that is packed into a .xap and uses managed assemblies. One of the reasons you gave for not doing this is that other developers one the team are not familiar with C#. This should not be an issue as C# is not a requirement for building apps in SL, you can continue to program against it in JavaScript. And if you are just writing JavaScript code, Visual Studio is not a requirement, since there is nothing to compile. They can just edit the .html/.js files and use the .xap/.dll files that were already compiled. Does this make sense?
I've got a single Silverlight app that I'd like to display in a grid. The way the Silverlight app displays its content is dependent on the unique ID of the record in each grid row. Unfortunately, the XAP file is re-downloaded for each row in the grid. With a size of 700KB, this really impacts performance. Is it possible to download the XAP file once and then just re-use it for each row in the grid?
Once a XAP is downloaded Silverlight will cache the assemblies etc locally per instance of a Silverlight control. If you create another instance of a Silverlight control then this in turn has it's own domain that it in turn looks after.
My suggestion is to abstract out the parts you requrie and bake them into a seperate xaml, then load them into areas where you need them the most. If you still require a central .xap to handle the marshalling / event management etc then in Silverlight 3 we've put in place a Local Connection API which allows other Silverlight instances to talk to one another within the one browser page locally (ie SilverlighA can talk to SilverlightB all within index.html)
This can then allow you to establish a sort of local proxy if you will.
Scott Barnes / Rich Platforms Product Manager / Microsoft.
I'm not sure you can. Theoretically it should be cached, but in this case theory don't seem worth squat.
It's all down to the way the < object > tag behaves with it's various params and this is (another) one of the "sparsely" documented areas of silverlight.
It is possible but not easy to do. You could download the xap and save it to IsolatedStorage and create a silverlight host each time you need one referencing your cached xap but you only have 1MB space available and you aren't guaranteed that if you have other silverlight apps from the same domain.
Given what you described I still don't see any value in doing what you want to do. I think you have it backwards.