Thursday, August 09, 2007

Silverlight: Useful Tips for Working with the Latest Bits and Tool Previews

The latest bits were just released for Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 along with updated previews of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, Expression Blend August Preview, ASP.NET Futures, etc. That's a lot of updates - and a lot of hassle - but definitely well worth the effort.

 

Of course, with every refresh of bits and update of tools, there's bound to be a few issues. Here are a few links to articles written by some very smart people out there in the "blogoshpere" that I found valuable and in some cases quite helpful:

 

So you just installed Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and you don't get intellisense or colorization for your JavaScript code? Yup, this happened to me too. Check out this post on the webdevtools blog.

 

Ok, if you had intellisense issues and read the last post, they should be working now. Once the JavaScript editor is playing nice, why not improve the intellisense a bit for Silverlight now? Check out this project from Justin-Josef:  

 

Are your AJAX applications are not behaving in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2? First, check your project's target framework and then read this article if you are still having issues. 

 

Are you working with PNG or GIF files in your Silverlight application? Experiencing seemingly unexplainable issues with your Silverlight Image control? If so, read this post by Rob Conery (about 1/2 way down the page) (Note: I had these issues as well and the answer was 'JPEGs')

 

If you don't enjoy editing your Silverlight project's JavaScript files in notepad from Expression Blend, here's a nice workaround posted by Microsoft Evangelist Jaime Rodriguez.

 

If you want your 'split views' to display vertically in Visual Studio 2008, Scott Gu has your answer.

 

Finally, a word about input and hit-testing. If you have a Silverlight element overlaying another element, but you want the element underneath to capture input, what do you do? Jaime Rodriguez writes about the IsHitTestVisible property, which will solve your problems.

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