Friday, July 17, 2009
A Silverlight 3 ASP.NET Host Control
Silverlight 3 has released, and with it have come some changes. One change is that the handy ASP.NET server control provided with Silverlight 2 is no longer supported. The official recommendation from MS is to simply embed client-side HTML tags (div and object tags) or use JavaScript to create an appropriate Silverlight embedding environment.
There certainly are upsides to that approach (flexibility and more customization), but there also are downsides (the control made things very simple, and it also allowed for code-behind access to properties on the control). Long story short: There really is no downside to having this control. For this reason, we recreated a Silverlight control 1:1 in the Milos Simple Web Controls assembly that you are probably already using in your ASP.NET apps. The control is 100% compatible. In fact, the only thing you have to change is the registration line of the assembly at the top of the .aspx file (the one that declares the "asp" namespace) so it points at SimpleWebControls.dll, rather than System.Web.Silverlight.dll file used by the Silverlight 2 SDK.
Oh, and btw: While we were at it, we made a few small improvements, such as a straightforward way to set the minimum required Silverlight version to 3.0.
Note that this also includes the entire design time experience as well as required resources such as images, XAML, and scripts.
Posted @ 1:44 AM by Egger, Markus (markus@code-magazine.com)
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