Recently I developed an application using a Pivot control as a "menu" and other pages with XNA content (2D and 3D).
Now, I discovered that my application won't be certified cause Im using System.XNA.Framework.Game and System.XNA.Framework.Graphics in my app.
This is really upsetting me at the moment, cause it's throwing away hours of work...
I never published something on the marketplace, so I'm asking if it's possible, anyway, to publish an application of this kind or at least, publish it as Beta Testing without "Certification" as they say on few pages..
Any clue?
Composite Silverlight+XNA applications are different from full-featured Silverlight applications invoking XNA assemblies. The restriction is still there - you must not have calls to Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game or Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.
Mind you, some XNA elements are still allowed, such as Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio, that gives you access to the Microphone class, or Microsoft.Xna.Framework, that lets you access the FrameworkDispatcher.
Related
I was talking to another developer recently and we started to discuss Window Phone 7 development. Their thoughts, from what they had heard (i.e no hands on knowledge) was it was really just Silverlight development. My reaction was that I see a lot of posts these days regarding Silverlight that call out being for "Windows Phone 7" so there must be some distinctions between the two.
So what I'm wondering is what are the differences between developing for WP7 v. the browser plugin.
The things I can think of, but seem obvious are:
WP7 Silverlight version isn't the same SL 4.0 but more like SL 3.5+
the hardware is different (memory\cpu)
I assume there are some different controls
you need to take into account the form factor
Not discounting the above list, which are important, but what else is different when developing a Silverlight application for WP7 v. browser plugin?
Thanks
There are a lot of technical differences and sure there are plenty here who give you bullet list of these. However there are really just a few real differences that make a big difference to how you develop apps for WP7.
Its a touch interface people
Quite a few apps I've played with from the market place seem to have developers struggling to grasp the concept of a touch based interface. Its clear that many are still using the left mouse down event when they ought to be looking for a "Tap" gesture. This can be frustrating for users trying to "flick" and find they've "clicked" instead.
So make sure you are using a gesture based framework (toolkit has one) so you don't annoy the users.
Your app will tombstone
WP7 guards its resources jealously. At a moments notice your app may be deactivate as the search screen or start screen is invoked. Volatile state of your app will be lost. WP7 API includes a number of ways of keeping key small chunks of data when your app gets "tombstoned" so that when the user returns to it, it should be able to restore near enough the same state it had before. However this isn't done auto-magically you have to code for it.
Again some of the apps in the market place don't handle this well and when you have an Omnia 7 which has a seriously sensitive search button that can be really frustrating.
Network access and other services are intermittent
If you are developing a connected app you need to cope gracefully with changing network access or loss of access all together.
Read the manual
Whilst there are plenty of resources get devs up and running real quick the devil is always in the detail. I recommend you at least start with reading Fundamental Concepts for Windows Phone which will cover some of these issues.
TBH there are a lot. Some of them:
Touch input vs Mouse clicks
Sounds and music
Silverlight 4.0 "/content/song.wma"
Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 "content/song.wav" (mind the slash)
Navigation philosophy
WP7 SL has two threads by default. One (compositor thread) runs all animation, second (UI Thread) runs the rest.
Controls have very diffrent default behavior and look
and many other OS realated
Better than any explanation, you should refer to the official website.
Silverlight for WP has support for (according to the same doc):
Hardware acceleration for video and graphics
Accelerometer for motion sensing
Multi-touch
Camera and microphone
Location awareness
Push notifications
Native phone functionality
It doesn't have regular COM bindings and it has somewhat limited access to reflection, among all restrictions.
For a complete list of features supported in Silverlight for Windows Phone, read this document.
I absolutely have no idea about Silverlight except that it is a Microsoft technology.
Having nearly completed a Computer Science degree, having programmed in C# for a few years in a work environment - have a good knowledge of Java and OO techniques - how hard is the road of average Silverlight programming? I've been offered some work DAMN IT!
I've mucked around with PHP, HTML and nearly no CSS..
Would I need a strong web programming background in order to pick it up?
I like Ben's answer, and he's right that a huge bonus of learning Silverlight is that you don't have to worry about the stateless model. However, there are a few parts of Silverlight that are less easy to learn:
Styling & control templates - These concepts look like CSS at first but there's a good bit more that you can do with them such as completely overriding the visual aspects of the control. Also, modifying the styles of existing controls is one thing and learning how to create your own control that can be easily styled is quite another.
Database connectivity - If you're anything like me the first thing you'll want to do after you write a "hello world" test is hook up to a Db and pull down some data. Since Silverlight can't directly connect to a Db you'll have to learn one of 3 techniques to move data between the browser and server: 1. WCF + your custom service methods + LINQ to SQL or LINQ to EF or whatever data access you choose. 2. ADO.NET Data Services (great way to start out) 3. .NET RIA Services (once you've realized that you need your data access technology to play nice with data binding and honor biz rules).
Security - You need to learn another part of the MS technology stack to get this working properly, ASP.NET Application Services. It should take more than a few hours to hook things up but it is another technology to learn.
Browser navigation, search engine friendliness & deep linking - Things you take for granted writing a traditional web app will take a bit more work in SL. You can use .NET RIA Services to handle browser navigation & deep linking, others have written about making your site friendly to search engines (and I don't know how ;).
What I'm trying to highlight here is that while learning the basics of Silverlight is easy, you'll probably run into other parts of the MS technology stack that you'll need to learn to get your work done. The beautiful thing here is that all of the technologies come from 1 vendor with a single focus and they work really well together. I shudder when I think about all the different technologies you'd need to pull off my current SL app in the open source domain.
Pick up the book "Silverlight Unleashed" and go to http://silverlight.net/GetStarted to start learning. Scott Gu's 8 part blog posting (#3 on that Getting Started web page) was one of the first things I read about Silverlight and is hugely helpful.
Unless your Silverlight app has to interact with a traditional web page, you don't need to know anything about traditional web UI technologies.
If you've done any desktop UI development you'll find Silverlight much easier to pick up than any web UI paradigm. Compared to the unholy mess that is css + html + javascript combined with ever-changing browsers and fourteen other hundred-author web "standards", Silverlight is a walk in the park.
First I'd like to make it clear, I'm not looking for a "my tech is better than yours" type of post; this is a real case scenario and I have been faced with this decision. With this in mind, let me explain:
We have a WinForms application. It started in the early .NET 1.0 but the first shipping version was using .NET 1.1. There are layers (like BusinessLayer.dll, Datalayer.dll, Framework.DLL, etc.) but at some point during the "long" development cycle of this application, the "presentation" layer (Win Forms) got infected with some code, thus the "separation between the code and the presentation with code behind" is some sort of myth.
Bad practices or whatever, the truth is that the application is there and it works.
Years passed and we had .NET 2.0, we slowly migrated and it mostly worked, had to change a few calls here and there. Last version did the same thing, but for .NET 3.5sp1. We needed some sort of Webservices thing, and decided to use WCF instead. It works fine.
But despite all these .NET upgrades, most of the application's codebase is still the same old rock and roll from 5 years ago. We use Gentle.NET (old and unmaintained now) for our dataobjects (it was a blessing 5 years ago!).
Our presentation layer, the winforms, are "nice looking" since we employ 90% of completely gdi+ custom controls. (whenever possible without having to hack the WinAPi). The application is touch based (i.e.: it makes use of the Ink but it doesn't rely on that), but the buttons, labels, etc, everything is "designed" to be used with a tactile device. (TabletPC or Touchscreen). Of course some users use keyboard/mouse.
With all that in mind, and with all this web2.0 and Internet fuzz (plus Jeff's posts ;) ), we are considering the possibility of rewriting the application but using a web technology.
The idea is obviously bringing more availability for our customers (they can use the system whenever/wherever they want), and less maintenance (we can upgrade and it is an instant upgrade for 'em all), etc. You know, the usual Internet vs WinApp thingy.
The problem is that given that this is the healthcare industry, not all of our customers might be willing to "move" their databases to our server/s, which is acceptable, and would force us to install a webserver/database server in their own servers so they have their own copy. Not a big problem (except we would have to update those manually but that's not an issue, given that we've been updating win32 apps for 5 years now!).
Now, back to the main "question".
The team has little Asp.NET experience, we did program a lot in ASP 2.0 (in 1999/2000) but that was a spaghetti of HTML+VBScript+CSS, so I don't think it counts. After all that experience (the Internet bubble!) we went back to VB6 then C#.NET 1x and you know the rest of the story. We're a small team of C# developers for WinForms. We've acquired some Linq To SQL Experience in our last .NET 3.5 ride, and we liked it. We felt it very natural and very "if we would have had this five years ago…" like.
Given all this, rewriting the application is not a "simple task" (not even if we wanted to do it in the already known C#.NET), it would take time and planning, but we could correct dozens of mistakes and with 5 years of experience working with the application, we now can say that we have a better idea of how the customers would like to use the software and what limitations we created (by ourselves) when we designed the current app.
All that "knowledge" of the application and the way the business works, could be applied to produce a much better application in terms of design and code and usability. Remember in .NET 1.1 we didn't even have generics! ;) (you'll see lots of ArrayList's hanging around here).
As an additional note, we use Crystal Reports (and, as usual, we hate it). We don't think the ink control is a "must" either. The HTML/CSS could be shaped to look the way we want it, although we're aware that HTML is not WinForms (and hence some things cannot be reproduced).
Do you think that planning this in MVC (or WebForms) would be too crazy?
I like the MVC (ruby on rails like) idea (I've never programmed in ruby beyond the basics of the book), so no one in our team is an expert, but we can always learn and read. It mustn't be "rocket science", must it?
I know that this whole question might be a little bit subjective, but would you replace an aging Winforms application with a new ASP/MVC/XXX web application? Do you have experience or have tried (and had success or failed) ?
Any insight in helping use better decide what to do will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE: Thanks to all who responded, we'll evaluate whether this is a good move or not, it sure is a hell of work, but I am afraid the the desktop app is getting older (using old net 1.1 hacks) and tho it has been more or less working without problems in Vista and W7, I'm afraid a future update may break it.
Also, lots of "more or less core" parts of the application are exposing some badly designed ideas and we had to hack here and there to accomplish certain tasks. Part inexperience, part lack of 100% knowledge of how the business worked (and Customers not sure what they wanted).
A new application (in any form) would allow us to create a better foundation while retaining all the user knowledge.
But, it's a L O T of work :) So we'll consider all these options here.
As some of you have mentioned, maybe a thinner client and some (ab)use of WCF here and there might be more appropriate.
Once again, thanks to all!
It would be best to ditch all your efforts of reusing the desktop application code when you recreate the web app. Following are the reasons:
Web apps especially asp.net use a different model. For starters note http is stateless. Each time the browser talks to server you have to explicitly send the current content of all the controls on the current page. You would not have used such a model in your Windows application.
To decrease load on the network you want to optimize the size of viewstate and how frequent you make http requests. Again your existing window app does not have any such provisions.
Updating view. You might have different event handlers, threads and what not in your windows application to update the GUI in different scenarios. All of that will need to be replaced. Javascript is a totally different animal.
Security. When using a browser your access to the local disk is highly limited whereas you will take the same for granted in windows application. If there is any code in the windows app that requires local resources, then that is going to be a trouble spot for you.
I would recommend the following:
Verify if your current application has any local disk access requirements (e.g. read/write to local file etc).
As you write the different http modules or handlers, you can try leveraging some of the backend/ business logic part of the existing windows application.
Give some thought to what part of your application can become a web service.
It sounds like the application needs a lot of refactoring to clean it up. If you want to move to a web model, and have maximum reuse you will really need to do that. Before you move to a web model I think you need to understand if it will be possible to replicate your user interface in that model. Is it your unique selling point from a customer perspective? You want decisions like this to be user driven rather than purely technical decisions.
It sounds like your application is the perfect candidate for a thick client application, rather than the lowest common denominator web model.
Some things to consider:
How will the web interface impact the Tablet interaction?
What new customers will having a web version bring you?
Will existing customers abandon your product?
Do you have access to consultants or outside resource with the right skills to mentor you in web technology? If you don't you can rely on StackOverflow or other web resources to help. You need some good mentoring and guidance on the ground with you.
What happens if you start this effort and it takes much longer than you expect? You know the app but don't sound like you know the web. Past experience shows that massive rewrites like this can end in disaster (it never sounds so difficult at the start)
Can you possibly write new features in a web-based version?
Could you move to ClickOnce deployment to make the application easier to deploy to customers. One of the benefits of the web is easier (zero) deployment. Can you get closer to that?
Would it be easier to migrate to WPF and create a browser application with that?
Silverlight or Flex might be better options for creating a rich experience, and may be more approachable for WinForms developers. Is this a possibility?
It seems like your app. is one of those that works best as a desktop app. Though you want your users to be able to access your app. using a browser.
I would suggest refactoring as much as possible so that the GUI gets cleaner and don't have "code".
When you've done this, start developing a asp.net mvc app but keep your desktop app. You should be able to use all layers except the UI layer, making it easier/faster/... Now that mvc exists, I'd say webforms is more about letting non-web devs do web. But you know web, sort of, and you want control so mvc is the way to go.
I've been asked to do some work on an existing Silverlight project, mainly extending it a bit and doing bug fixes as needed. But there are a couple of ASP.Net pages too and a WCF service to deal with too. My background is desktop development with .Net so I think this is a good opportunity to start getting more involved in Web development.
So I'm trying to figure out what background knowledge I need for a project like this. Clearly I need to get familiar with Silverlight, but I'm not sure what other Web technologies, etc I need to ramp up on for this project. Obviously I would like to know as much as possible but in reality with limited time and resources I really need to focus on what I important in the near term for this project. Then expand my knowledge as things arise.
The things I'm thinking that are important in the immediate future are:
The basics of Web Development (I'm thinking this might be the most important\fundamental area to build a good foundation)
But what are consided the basics?
What is technology\language independent?
What is important for Silverlight?
The basics of ASP.Net (since there is some ASP.Net code)
What are the basics? ASP.net seems so huge, I have a 1000+ pg book here which seems daunting.
If you focus on Silverlight is knowing ASP.Net important, or is ASP.Net something I will continually run into?
How does ASP.Net MVC fit into the overall development picture and especially as related to Silverlight?
The basics of WCF
As compared what?
Any suggestions\comments on the list above?
What other topics\technologies will I run into if I continue doing Web development?
Note: Beyond this project I would focus on the Microsoft stack.
Generally speaking the amount of knowledge of ASP.Net you need to do Silverlight development is very very low.
Silverlight applications are hosted in a browser, usually via the <object> tag. This can sit on an asp.net page or a html page. The Silverlight template creates that for you, so you can forget its there and just get on with the Silverlight app.
Of course if you are integrating into an ASP.net environment (for example, islands of Silverlight sprinkled through an ASP.net site) then thats another thing. There are ways to get Silverlight talking to the HTML dom via the HTML Bridge but its not necessary. Really depends on what you are developing and integrating with. (new site vs existing)
I avoided ASP.net for as much as i could as the richness compared to desktop (WPF) just wasnt there. Silverlight changed all that. Its a Rich world on the web now!
Best place to start learning Silverlight is www.silverlight.net on the getting started part of the site. great Quickstarts and tutorials there.
Good luck
Only cursory knowledge of traditional web technologies (css, html, js, etc.) are necessary for silverlight development. As a consequence, you also don't need to understand the many cross-browser dependencies as well.
Here is my list of things that you must get a really good understanding of to be proficient at Silverlight development:
Understanding WCF (the Silverlight-supported parts) is essential. It can be a configration nightmare, but once working it is pretty stable/ reliable
You need to understand serialization used by WCF and how to debug the mysterious 404 errors. Get good at Fiddler and/or Firebug.
You must understand multi-threaded applications and how do debug them. Silverlight makes extensive use of threading to not block the UI thread. This creates numerous opportunities for race conditions that create what appear to be "magical" results. That said, it is incredibly powerful and IMHO one of the dominant reasons to use Silverlight.
What you learn about serialization and WCF will ultimately help you cache some data in IsolatedStorage. Learn about IsoStorage, it will reduce our bandwidth requirements and cost and improve your user experience
Learn about Linq - again this is one of the most powerful features of Silverlight. Combined with a smart client-side caching strategy you can offload lots of processing to the client.
Figure out how you going to support printing. SL3 does not at all and you will need a server side component. SL4 beta does, but it is not go live
Understand the Silverlight Roadmap as much as possible and plan out your roadmap to match/ sync with it as best as possible. I first built a SL2 app and I spent a lot of time building things by hand that were ultimately released in SL3. As it is getting more mature, there is less of this.
Download the Silverlight Toolkit and use it. But more importantly examine the source code, the structures, its build process. There is not better real world place to look for inspiration & best practices.
Good luck.
Since the launch of Silverlight 2 I was expecting a lot of full blown Silverlight applications popping up but still there seem to be little evidence of this. Does anybody know of such applications out there in the wild. And also what would be the obvious applications you would develop in Silverlight. I would say mail clients are bad examples as they just as well could be written as a web/ajax app. As Silverlight is far more powerful than web+ajax possible candidates should be impossible/akward implementing as a web/ajax app.
The ones that comes to my mind is
Photo and imaging editing apps
Reporting applications
Office applications, Word/Excel...
Edit:
Added from posts
Games
The point isn't that the app need to fill the whole screen just that it isn't just a small part of a webpage, or you could call it a full blown application running inside the webbrowser, only using the webbrowser as a host.
I think the Medical app that Microsoft itself developed shows pretty well what could be achieved with silverlight http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/
As for image editing then as I understand its a bit difficult as Silverlight lacks a Bitmap API to be able to do per pixel image editing...
Edit:
I noticed you added Word/Excel to your question and there comes the problem that Silverlight doesn't have a rich text editor built in and there hasn't been real good examples of custom implementations. There is one http://www.codeplex.com/richtextedit but I haven't seen any applications that actually use it.
I'm working on one in the medical domain.
This started as an update of a Mac classic application but due to the amount of work involved, broadened to considering other toolkits. I convinced them to go for an initial WPF desktop port to be followed by a Silverlight version.
I don't know one so far, but I could imagine that it could be used in a kind like the fullscreen video playback on youtube.
How many fullscreen desktop apps are there? Most application don't need the entire screen. If you don't want to be distracted by menus and taskbars and so you go fullscreen. Another type of applications that can use fullscreen are games.
You are limited in fullscreen to certain key presses such as arrow keys, tab, enter, and space so this rules out some of those types of apps. They have done this for security reasons so an app can't hijack the screen and record the keypresses, but I wish they could come up with a scheme to sufficiently warn the user then allow it if they consent.
An application Microsoft seem to like to show case is the AOL mail client written entirely in silverlight.
Personally I follow the rule is if you would not write it in flash you would not write it in silverlight preferring AJAX in most cases. In the past most large flash application have failed such as the flash word processor (cant remember the name) while AJAX enabled applications such as google documents have taken off.
Finally I believe until moonlight (linux and mac support) has been released and more general users have silverlight downloaded developers will be reluctant to use it widely even for smaller apps and gadgets.