I have a silverlight application, now I want make it run as a mac OSX app, perhaps aiming to sell on app store. Since I'm completely a newbie in mac developing, is it possible to make this silverlight app run like a native app?
Maybe there is some way to make a browser shell, and embed that silverlight on a html to show it. is there any way make it more native without a browser control, and I want to disable the right click "silverlight" popup.
More over, since silverlight cannot access local file system directly, any good idea to do this? First came into my mind is put a webservice module in the app, so that this app acts both client(silverlight) and server, and then process the local file on server module.
The most you can do is have it run as a Silverlight Out Of Browser application (see a bit more detailed explanation here). This mode is pretty much like running in a chromeless browser, however it is still running in the same sandbox and you have very limited resource access.
Apps running this way will definitely not have the native OS/X app feel, neither will they be started similarly and you won't be able to sell it on the Apple App Store.
If you want to target Mac desktops and deliver a native experience I'm afraid currently Objective C or a framework on top of that is the only viable choice.
Related
After entering into phonebook or gmail or playing YouTube through the testing application, I am losing all the controls to test or query. As soon as it comes into play I lose control. Then I have to manually deal with it. On writing tree on Repl mode I am not able to see anything.
This is because you are leaving the application. Xamarin UITest works by running a client-side server next to or inside the mobile application. the client-side server is what enables us to interact with controls and query for things on the screen.
If you are on iOS, you have to have the Calabash agent installed in the application to make things work. Once you leave the application (switching to YouTube or other app), the client-side server is backgrounded and won't be able to do anything because of how iOS operating system is designed.
On Android, it depends on what version of Android you are using. Older Android versions don't sand box apps the same. Android 6.0 and above have more security controls and I wouldn't expect this behavior to work.
If you are trying to test if those things work, You should be testing that the Intent you are sending is correct. You are really testing the operating system at this point because you are verifying that YouTube or whatever did what you expected. Really we should have a base assumption that when we provide the phonebook with the proper intent, the operating system should behave accordingly. If you test that the video actually opens in the YouTube app, you are now testing if YouTube can open their links/intents successfully. Some people decide to test these things, many find that it is redundant and increases their teams cycle time.
I hope this helps!
Disclosure: I work at Xamarin/Microsoft
As far as I am concerned and what I've already implemented there is a way to cooperate somehow with mobile apps such as sending some instructions between mobile and LabVIEW instruments but...
Is there any way to implement mobile application with LabVIEW ?
I suppose that officially not, but what about some external frameworks such as LabVIEW hacker toolkit ?
I've never seen anything that allows you to create native apps. The usual solutions other than data dashboard are using web technologies:
Write a html page that LabVIEW can host that can load on the mobile device and use http or websockets for communications. There are some toolkits to automate this for example LabSocket (though not sure how much mobile testing is done with it).
Remote viewing technologies. I saw one the other day called wezarp which works on mobile.
All of these depending on a Windows based application that you are talking too though. I'm afraid natively I don't think anything exists and would be very hard to implement as you would need to play with the LabVIEW compiler to cross-compile to objective-c, java or javascript.
There was a way: NI LabVIEW mobile module which worked for windows mobile. You would program an app in LabVIEW, compile it and load onto your Windows phone. I recollect it worked pretty stable. The solution is not recommended for new projects
For dashboard style panels, there is Data Dashboard for LabVIEW Android smartphone version allows you to view only. (tablet version allows you to exercise limited control options) Also available for iPhone.
Something available here for select devices only
I was asked to develop a software in vb.net and one of it's features should be the possibility to take photos on a tablet PC. I already played around with the MediaCapture API which returns me a photo, but as it seems that it's not possible to show a preview or anything else outside of ModernUI apps. It's just pure photo capturing.
I thought for a little while how this problem could be solved. I got some inspiration from my Android phone then. My idea was to call some sort of API to open up the regular Windows 8 camera app in ModernUI mode, let the user take the photo and then receiving that through a "return value", just like you usually do it in Android apps.
Now my question is, if there is a way to start up the Windows 8 default camera app, let it take a photo and receive that back into my WPF desktop application.
I could develop my software as ModernUI app as well, but I never did that and it also seems like you must publish it over the web store then, but I only want to use that inside my company.
My other (simple stupid) idea would be to ask the user to open the camera app by himself, take some photos and come back to my software later. I could then receive the images from the folder they were stored in. I guess that would work as well, but I don't really like that idea because it's not very intuitive and seems just stupid.
If you have an idea (or an alternative), I would be really happy if you could share it with me.
Thanks in advance!
Unfortunately, there are no .NET classes that allow you to access a webcam or integrated camera on your computer. This means that you have to take a look at the native Windows API and call it from your application. I cannot point you to the right methods that you have to use, as I just have used Microsoft Media Foundation to capture a continuous stream of images from a webcam and encode it to a video file.
There are some sites that encapsulate this native functionality in .NET classes, but I don't know if they are good or not:
http://dotnet.dzone.com/articles/using-webcam-wpf-application
http://www.yiigo.com/guides/vbnet/how-to-process-image.shtml
(just google for more if you'd like to).
In Windows Store Apps, this task can be performed relatively easy with the media capture API you've mentioned. You can also side-load Windows Store Apps if you have Windows 8 Pro or Enterprise - then you do not have to publish your app in the Windows Store.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.
I am thinking of making a website using a WPF browser application, but would like to know the minimum requirement a client/internet user must have to access this website made by using WPF.
Please state even the very basic requirements, like does he need to run Windows or will even Mac and Linux do, with any browser to view the application?
Three main requirements:
User has to run the application under Windows;
The browser should be either Interned Explorer or Firefox;
The .Net Framework should be installed on user's machine.
One requirement is to have the .NET framework installed (same version as you used to build your application), so that means it will only run under Windows.
Also I think only Internet Explorer and Firefox support XBAP applications.
Also I assume that you know there is a lot of restrictions for you, the developer, on what is allowed or not compared to a full trust program. For example, the file system and registry among other things are restricted in a WPF browser application.
We are planning to build a new integration component that can provide us access to user's machine installed apps from our web site.
The first word that came to me was ActiveX, but our expertise with the technology was not the best in the past.
Thinkink a lit bit more, the work Silverlight also came to my head, but the full trust thing was one of the few things I remembered reading about the technology..
The question is: is there a way that Silverlight (2, 3, 4, whatever) can run as a full trusted application from within the browser?
Links are appreciated.
Filipe
Unfortunately, no. Full trust is a feature of Silverlight 4, currently in beta, and is restricted to out-of-browser applications.
Additionally, full trust SL4 applications do not have unrestricted access to the system (particularly file system), though this may change before before release (if I have anything to do with it).
Edit: If you are considering ActiveX (which is Windows/IE only), you might want to have a look at WPF, since it can run full trust from the browser (if it's in a trusted zone).
No, like Richard said, this is not at all possible inside the browser, even in SL4. There is a sandbox, and you live in it. You can talk to web services, other Silverlight applications or the browser.
By talking to the browser, I mean you can talk to the DOM and the Javascript engine. We needed to launch a Windows application and communicate to it via Silverlight. We accomplished this by putting a small ActiveX control in the web page. It is responsible for launching the WinForms application and handling inter-process communication to it.
This method has many drawbacks: It can only work in IE, and it only works in Windows. You might also run into permissions issues. The ActiveX component needs to be installed along with the desktop application, or as an additional download. The deployment story there is pretty awful, if you ask me.
In our case, the analysts were willing to deal with the restrictions for the re-usability of an existing application, and we consider it to be an optional feature.
Does it have to be a web application? sounds like you want a desktop app. It can be easiliy distributed with one Click deployment. Will work on windows only but since you were considering ActiveX sounds like that's what you need.
Well - if you're hosting the silverlight control from an ASP.NET application - Believe you have access to
Request.ServerVariables["AUTH_USER"];
...and you can pass that on to your control as a parameter.
D