Question: What is the best cross platform multitouch approach for Silverlight?
Background:
I’ve been developing large SL4 applications and have now started porting them to WP7.
The porting itself has been fantastic – virtually no changes required between the platforms. But now with WP7 comes the issue of multi-touch. With growing bemusement, I discovered that there are now at least 4 different options for implementing multi-touch in Silverlight, none ideal, and none perfectly cross platform.
The best analysis of the Microsoft provided options I’ve found are from Jeff Prosise (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) and Charles Petzold.
Great! GestureService/GestureListener in the Silverlight Toolkit looks perfect. Just what I need. So I start down the path of incorporating this in my app and run into the following frustrating sequence.
GestureService/GestureListener is
only in the WP7 Silverlight Toolkit,
but not in the Silverlight Toolkit
for SL4.
OK. Download the source for the
WP7 Toolkit and attempt to make my
own version of
GestureService/GestureListener for SL4. Even though Touch.FrameReported
is available in SL4, another key class Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Touch is not available. Dead End.
Start looking for open source alternative touch libraries. Waste many hours.
Settle on
www.codeplex.com/multitouch.
Discover after many more wasted hours
that only Portrait mode is currently
supported, and not Landscape. Dead
End.
So, is there any workaround to get GestureService/GestureListener working in SL4? If not, can anyone guess when/if it will be available in the SL4 toolkit? Waiting for SL5 isn't really an option.
There is no out of the box solution. However, we have built and open source touch library to provide parity and wire in the missing events on the Silverlight side. Take a look:
http://lighttouch.codeplex.com/
I had the same issue a year ago. Unfortunately, I had to implement my own solution for SL which was based on Touch.FrameReported and TouchFrameEventArgs.GetTouchPoints. I know, it is a little bit low-level, but it was the only reliable option for me.
Here is a short tutorial by Tim Heuer: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/07/30/silverlight-3-multi-touch-introduction-fundamentals-basics.aspx
Related
I am new in windows phone development.
I really have some doubts,
Is WPF is actually using for the windows phone app development ?
I am just confused about to reply to one who ask "Which platform or technology will use for developing windows phone apps ?".
I hope to get a good clear reply here.. I googled it many times. but I didnt get any clear idea yet about this.
Thnks.
No, WP7 development does not use WPF. It uses Silverlight (or XNA for games).
However, the two are quite closely related. WPF was developed in 2006 and introduced the concepts of bindings, creation of UIs via XAML, visual trees, animation, dependency properties and much more. Many of the WPF concepts were re-used by Silverlight, the web-based plugin. Whilst WPF and Silverlight are similar, they are not the same. Despite this, with a little effort, code sharing between the two is possible.
See the following question for more references:
Getting Started with Windows Phone 7
Windows Phone 7 applications can be written using Silverlight or XNA.
With Silverlight you use XAML to create your user interface (as in WPF), but there are couple differences between these 2 technologies: Contrasting Silverlight and WPF.
I am Really confused by reading some articles about Silverlight. Whether I should concentrate on WPF or Silverlight or Both?.
It's like asking Web or Desktop : Which one has upper hand?
Silverlight (Web) and WPF (Desktop) Both are similar. But both have their separate workplaces.
You cannot have a Windows Calculator, Task Manager or MS Word (please don't mention google docs) applications on web like they are on desktop. And same thing applies for web applications.
So, it depends on what platform you want to work on.
I dont think its difference between Web and Desktop. Silverlight is still pretty limited by platform it can run on and still requires some local runing process, even in the sandbox.
I think difference here is features vs availability. WPF can give you features of whole .NET framework, total acess to users's computer and some features that are not available in SL. SL on the other hand allows you to run your app on some different systems (Windows, Mac and there is limited support for Linux-based systems), distribution is much easier thanks to web deployment and whole application can be part of your web ecosystem.
Iam personaly for WPF, but thanks to this whole web and cloud-hype in the last years, SL is getting much more attention from side of MS and developers in general.
Reading these questions and their answers may give you some insight into this:
Definitive source(s) for the difference between Silverlight and WPF
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1254937/wpf-vs-silverlight
What is the difference between WPF and Silverlight?
I totally agree with decyclone, it depends on which platform you want to work. If you have prior experience Asp.net/We applications Silverlight is the way whereas if you have worked in WinForms/Windows applications then WPF is the way to go.
But yes most of the concepts in both SL and WPF are similar; so once you have good understanding of those concepts, you work in either without much problem.
If we ignore the platform then WPF is having the upper hand as WPF is kind of superset of SL.
Have a look at this SO question too -
Learn Silverlight or WPF first?
I am a 6-years .Net Developer, and want to know which is better to start learning first, Silverlight or WPF.
I know this question seems a little-bit argumentative but since Silverlight is a mini-version of WPF. I think this takes away the argumentation.
So in the light of that, if I considered start learning:
Silverlight First: Because it would be easier to learn than its big brother.
WPF First: Because it would be easier to know the basic concepts and event-model of WPF before moving to SL.
Learn Silverlight first so you won't be annoyed that you cannot use useful things like RelativeSource and x:Static in Silverlight :P
Silverlight will be fused with WPF in a couple of years.
Study Silverlight first, i recommend the book Pro Silverlight 4 in C# from Apress, the unique that have color pages.
If in future you'll need some extra Windows functions, go to the much complete WPF.
With Silverlight you can also develop Windows phone 7 applications, and Xbox 360 (rumored). In windows 8 will be a Silverlight Marketplace (valid rumor), and you can create very rich applications / part of website / full websites instead of using the slow, crappy and "browser inconstistent" JQuery+Canvas that have no tools at all for design (and when it will have, Silvelight 5 will have real 3D and better tools).
Also the fact to use the same language for client and server is priceless.
Well Silverlight and WPF is "pretty much" the same actually. As you said Silverlight has only a subset of the .NET framework but it doesn't make it "simpler" than WPF.
The biggest leap you will have to make in order to learn those languages is learning XAML, which is the same in both.
It all depends on what you need to do. Do you want to publish your project to the web, then go with silverlight (you can do a XBAP project in WPF to publish it to the web, but clients will need Full .NET Framework). If you need advanced .NET functionnality, then use WPF.
Silverlight first. It is easier to add the extra WPF features than to unlearn things when doing WPF first.
Having said that, it doesn't matter that much. There is more on Silverlight on the web these days.
What kind of applications do you want to write ? Desktop applications that need local access or web based applications ?
If it is a matter of learning, I would learn both in parallel. Keeping your application consistent to run in both run times will force you to learn all of the little differences. Once you get past the main SilverLight features, shift into the features only provided by WPF (though I would start with the libraries likely to be included with SL5, first, such as 3D).
Go with Silverlight first, although it is not as feature rich as WPF it is simpler. Also Microsoft are actively evolving the platform. Silverlight is not a true subset of WPF as it had things like a DataGrid control first.
Good learning resource: http://www.silverlight.net/learn/ together with the Pro Silverlight book which you already have.
The further advantage of starting with Silverlight is that it will be easier to develop for the new Windows phone (broadly it uses an older version of Silverlight).
Learn both at the same time! Not one or the other, but both. There's plenty of overlap between the two technologies which should make it more practical to focus on both at once.
I'm considering switching from MFC to WPF.
My first concern is that there are too many users who don't have .NET with WPF installed yet. Can anybody point to a source containing the WPF penetration numbers?
My second concern is speed.
Any other considerations?
I've been banging away at WPF for a while now. It is brilliant, but it still has (occasional) holes you've to plug yourself. However all indications are .NET 4.0 will be a significant step forward.
I would say start now. The WPF learning curve is REALLY steep, and it'll be a while before you'll be releasing software to users, believe me. Also do yourself a favour and get the WPF Unleashed book. It's superior.
Speed isn't a consideration. The power WPF gives is well worth any drawbacks with speed, which - coming from Windows Forms - I haven't noticed to be honest.
What kind of application are you developing? If it's a wide-distribution desktop app that you want your grandmother to install, your concern about .NET 3.0/3.5 adoption is valid. So far from what I've seen, performance is less of a concern.
WPF penetration
First of all, Windows Vista and Windows 7 both have WPF preinstalled, which accounts for 35% of the market automatically. Windows XP has had it as it had .NET Framework 3.0 as an option in Windows Update for over three years, and many applications ship with it, so it is likely to also be installed on a high percentage of Windows XP machines. StatOwl indicates that about 80% of NET Framework installations are version 3 or above.
If you're shipping on CD it is no big deal to include the latest .NET Framework on the CD and have it install automatically. If users are downloading your application, it can contact Microsoft's web server to download and install the latest .NET Framework. Online ClickOnce deployment also has this capability if you want people to be able to start their application directly from the web browser without installing it.
So the bottom line is, you probably don't need to worry about whether people will have WPF installed on their machines or not unless your target market consists primarily of dial up customers on Windows XP who don't run much third-party software (i.e., they just run Windows and your application).
Speed
Not an issue. I have a 200 MHz Pentium Pro with 384 MB RAM from 1998 that I test my software on, and my WPF applications have comparable performance with equivalent MFC applications. If your WPF application uses lots of fancy graphics and animation it will run slowly on ancient CPUs and graphics cards, but so would an ordinary MFC application with the same features.
Don't even bother trying to use WPF if you are sticking with Visual Studio 2008 for the next year or two. The experience will be way too painful. I'm talking about "my IDE crashed again" type of pain.
If you are going to use VS 2010 in the near future, then WPF is a blast. Download the beta, a couple of themes off CodePlex, are start playing. Once you get past the (freaking huge) learning curve I think you will find it to be quite enjoyable.
IMHO, you should wait for Visual Studio 2010 and WPF 4.0 to make the actual migration. They will close some very annoying gaps in the product.
Meanwhile, you can try it out. In terms of coding/readability -- it's going to be WAAAY better than with MFC =)
As for the performance and platform -- it shouldn't be a problem unless you have any very special circumstances (like if you can't require users to install .NET).
Also see this related question on switching to WPF from Windows Forms.
If you are thinking about a larger, modular, appliation I recommend checking out Prism. It's a bit of a beast itself, but you should be able to tackle it after coming to grips with C#, Dependency Properties and XAML. Plus, learning Prism gave me a much better understanding of WPF/Silverlight, at least from the development/binding side.
Mike Taulty posted an excellent 10 part video series on Prism. It's a great way to get your head around the platform.
I'd also recommend the pages linked to from the Getting Started page on codeplex. After all that, you're probably ready to tackle the Reference Implementation which comes with the download.
A previous answer of mine might also help clear up any remaining confusion around Controllers/Presenters in the framework that you might have (I did).
Is it possible to convert an existing WPF Application to SilverLight automatically/with minimal effort?
I would argue that you CAN port Silverlight to WPF with minimal effort. I spent 2 hours porting and application I spent 3 weeks writing. I would argue that those 2 hours spent would categorize as minimal effort.
Sure, you need to create a new project, add the files to the new project and tweak them.
Since Silverlight is a subset of WPF its allot easier to go from Silverlight to WPF than the other way around.
For business logic and non-UI code your code should port almost straight across. I had some minor issues around authentication, as Silverlight 2 will pick up any authentication information in the browser, while in WPF you have to role your own login screen and manage cookies etc.
For the XAML it will port straight across if you don't style your controls. If you style your controls the use of the Visual State Manager, currently missing in WPF, will make things a little trickier. You can either re-style your controls in WPF using Triggers, or you can use the VSM implementation for WPF done by John Gossman. Microsoft have announced that they will add the VSM to WPF to make the two frameworks more compatible.
The perhaps most important reuse tough, is skills and experience. Since the two platforms are so similar you will be able to reuse all your skills in WPF.
I recently did a blog post about the Dive Log sample application and how I ported it from Silverlight 2 to WPF. Might give you some idea of the process.
Not really. I have found some articles regarding the multi-targeting option for WPF and Silverlight at the same time. At this moment, if you are not using PRISM, it is quite a challenge to target both of them, fortunately achievable.
What do you need to have in mind is that Silverlight uses a smaller (thus more limited) library than WPF.
In response to the comments:
Actually, there is already support for silverlight in PRISM (v2). The idea of PRISM is to provide guidance to developing applications not only using WPF but using Silverlight also - Prism V2 formally was known as Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight.
By using PRISM for silverlight capabilities, it would give you the warranty that your code would work on both platforms with minimal changes, if none (except maybe the different project types for visual studio).
But of course, if you already started developing your application, you would need to change your code to use PRISM.
Will and Bogdan's answers are correct. The keyword here is "minimal".
Rob Eisenberg has a list of differences here (though this was pre-RTW).
List of Differences in WPF & Silverlight
No. Silverlight runs in its own cut-down version of the CLR. It also is WPF-like, not WPF. You'll have to do a fair amount of work to convert it.
Times have changed. Check out Portable Class Libraries, now supported in .NET 4.0. You can build assemblies that can be used on different supported platforms: WP7, Silverlight WPF and even XBOX applications.
Here is a thread about this:
http://silverlight.net/forums/t/3898.aspx