We're in the process of creating a Silverlight project and wondered how we could validate/test if it would run on Moonlight. From regular .Net to Mono there is the Mono Migration Analyzer which generates a report on which methods are missing in Mono to provide full support.
Are there any similar tools from Silverlight to Moonlight?
As I know there aren't any and event wouldn't be by my opinion.
The situation with moonlight is little bit more complicated.
With mono you're checking just clr methods towards standard. That's pretty easy.
Moonlight 1.0 is only stable version and should be 100% compatible with Silverlight, XAML is covered, but there are of course some bugs, the only comparision is on this page: http://go-mono.com/moonlight/MoonlightStatus.aspx.
Moonlight 2.0 is in beta state, there is clr part that can be checked with moma towards the mono version it's based on, cause the binaries are only stripped by mono linker. The API will be quite near 100% if not fully compleated. The rest is same like with Moonlight 1.0.
The status page is here: http://go-mono.com/moonlight/MoonlightStatus.aspx?v=2
Like Yakeen said, 2.0 is in beta. The best way to test is going to be installing moonlight on a test box and manually testing your site.
If it were me, I'd create a Virtual Machine with some flavor of Linux+Firefox and install the beta from their download site
Related
I'm planning web application and considering silverlight as development platform. Will it help to solve browser compatibility issues? The app intended to be used on desktops only (no mobile).
Yes, it will solve browser compatibility issues, and could work on both Mac OS and Windows with the very same code.
The only drawback is that, the first time your user connect to your application, he will need to download the Silverlight plugin.
Awesome you would say? Well, unfortunately some people that probably never try to do something like image processing or advanced line of business application in a browser decide that plugins are not so cool and that you would be able to do the same thing with the magic power of HTML5.
We are still waiting to have the same possibility in HTML5 that we have in Silverlight or Flash, but plugins are already dead. At least as long as no big compay want to push them again.
So, my advice would be: don't start a project in Silverlight. You will have problems, even if you do not target mobile. For example it becomes harder and harder to find compatible good tools (like ReSharper, NCrunch, or even just a decent unit testing library). And in further release of Windows and Mac OS, it will probably not be supported at all (IE for Windows RT already does not support Silverlight).
Sorry man, Silverlight is dead, you arrive after the battle.
If your developing your application for an Intranet, I would say Silverlight is an excellent choice.
If you are developing for the Internet, use an HTML based language
Our team is using Silverlight 5 for development as it has features we require going forward. I have discovered that NUnit doesn't work as standard as it isn't Silverlight and that the tools available for Silverlight testing appear to primarily be aimed at running within browsers and are a pain to automate it seems.
However a lot of the code I want to test is the View Models which aren't specifically Silverlight, so I was hoping there is a way of using NUnit or similar to just test this and integrating into a build server (which is currently being decided upon)
So, is it possible to test Silverlight in this way?
I haven't tried it but looks interesting:
http://statlight.codeplex.com/
and what about third parties (maybe Telerik offers something on their testing suite).
I know it's no ideal, but if it's just VM and non dependant on UI you can link the files to a WPF project and execute the unit tests (in our case we had to share two versions the SL and the WPF one that's why we chose to test our VM in the WPF version :-)).
The unit testing from Silverlight (toolkit) I haven't found a way to link it to an automated build process
The best solution I have found is AgUnit:
http://agunit.codeplex.com/
AgUnit is an open source plugin for ReSharper. This solution of course assumes that you're using ReSharper. AgUnit allows you to run Silverlight unit tests in the ReSharper test running. Unfortunately, I just checked the AgUnit site and it looks like they only support Silverlight 5. You may want to head over there and find out about their plans for supporting Silverlight 5 though as it is a great plugin.
Prior to using AgUnit, we were using Statlight and found it to be pretty good as well, just not quite as convenient as AgUnit.
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).
I need to develop a part of a business application in a flashy eye candy way. Therefore wanted to see if I can use DirectX. Here's what I got.
First I read how using C/C++ is like shooting yourself on the foot and I should use DirectX.NET instead. I couldn't disagree. It's the 21st century.
Downloaded DirectX SDK but couldn't find the .NET assemblies in there. Searching the net now revealed that DirectX .NET (called MDX) is now obsolete (released in 2006). And that I should use XNA instead which was mainly developed for XBOX.
Downloaded XNA. But it won’t install because I don't have C#.NET Express 2005 SP1. Installed SP1 on my VS Pro 2005. But it won’t install still. It needs Express 2005 and exactly that single one version, not Pro, clearly not 2008.
Frustrated tried to download C#.NET Express which is free. But the link from MS which says C#.2005 actually downloads C#.2008, because C#.2005 is now obsolete.
And now I read that MS is now putting it's force behind WPF/silverlight. And XNA doesn't support DX10 and Vista doesn't come with DX9.
Now I have two choices:
Go 15 years back and code in plain old C/C++. At least C has proven itself to be timeless.
Try silverlight.
What would be your advice? Or am I missing something?
Udpate: Would like to add that DX10 is not backward compatible with any other DX version. SlimeDX looks really promissing. But as a very new package, I am not sure how much helpful the documentation and tutorials will be.
Udpate 2: It seems that the first download link that google brings up when searching for XNA download, which I used, is not the latest one. Thanks DouglasH for providing the link to v.3. Downloaing it. Probably it will work.
But then agian. Should I switch to WPF/Silverlight? Or go with XNA? Which one is better documented and future-profe?
More update: Vista realy doesn't come with DirectX 9 preinstalled [check by googling]. At least it didn't on my machine bnough last year. Googling for it revealed that I have to manually install DirectX 9 on Vista after downloading it from MS. But my attemet failed beucase hardware drivers for DX9/vista were missing or didn't work. I got the idea that it's not supported that well.
MS has stopped supporting the .net DirectX libraries. There is an open source alternative called SlimDX, and it works well. The documentation leaves some to be desired, but it can be puzzled together by using the DirectX C++ documentation and some common sense.
WPF does pretty good 3D stuff, and there are lot of fish eye panels and source code available for WPF, yes since MS has gone ways from their technology, in today's terms, we can not focus on only one technology by MS to make entire one business application.
Sure we are also tired of using multiple different versions of technologies even to do smallest parts, but I believe they are doing great job by serving billion machines, it sure isnt easy but WPF and .NET seem to be most stable technologies by microsoft and also they are spending good money on making completely managed operating system as well.
If you ever go back to C or C++, you might want to check out Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL).
IMHO, it is much easier than DirectX.
URL: http://www.libsdl.org/
DirectX is fully backwards-compatible. Any DX9 application will run on Vista and DX10. As for XNA and VS2005 - that's a bit weird. That would make XNA effectively useless. Check if you haven't missed something.
couple of points, which version of XNA did you download. Here is the link for XNA Studio 3.0 which will run on Visual Studio 2008. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7D70D6ED-1EDD-4852-9883-9A33C0AD8FEE&displaylang=en
2nd, I sure hope that Vista has Direct X 9, since that is the version of direct X that the DWM runs on in Vista. I think you will find the DLLs for Direct X 9 and before and the DLL,s for DirectX 10 loaded in Vista. Or for that Matter Windows 7 which will also have directX 11 (edit 2 note that the DWM is built on DirectX10, with a software emulator for systems that don't have 3d video hardware, a dx10ondx9 drivers for those with directx 9 cards and of course full support for directx 10 cards).
edit,
Additionally if you downloaded the March directx sdk, you download, directx 9.0c, directx 10, 10.1 and the beta of directX 11. and I would have to check if DirectX 8.x is still included or not although DirectX 9 is backwards compatible with most of that platform.
Though I never worked directly with DirectX (little bit with OpenGL) - I would take WPF. The least-painful to implement (transparency, gradients, brushes, animations, etc.) and it provides solid-performance from what I have seen and experienced myself.
But yes, it's not platform-independent.
We have been using Adobe Flex for a major project but it's just too slow.
We're considering switching to Silverlight.
The problem seems to be that Silverlight is not as widely supported by browsers as Flex/Flash is.
For example I tried to access the Silverlight showcase using Safari for Windows but it didn't work.
A web RIA platform surely has to have browser ubiquity as its foundation?
Browser Plugins are essentially native applications, so you essentially need a Plugin for each architecture.
For example, there is no 64-Bit Flash Plugin for Windows, so I always have to use 32-Bit IE for that. I also believe that there is no Linux-PPC support, but it's been a while since I've looked at that. And that new JavaFX stuff from Sun also does not run on many platforms and browsers.
For a list of supported Platforms, Wikipedia has a neat table:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlight#Compatibility
IMHO Flash is the only thing that comes near perfection. Microsoft is just supporting a few major browsers.