ให้ตายสิไมโครซอฟท์ ออก Microsoft Expression Blend มาให้ใช้ แต่กลับไม่มีวิธีง่ายๆในการฝังไฟล์ Silverlight ลงใน ASP.NET !!!

เรื่องเริ่มต้นที่ว่าตอนหัดใช้ Silverlight ก็ต้องมานั่งแกะเองทีละขั้น ตอนนั้นก็คิดว่า ของใหม่เครื่องมือยังห่วยอยู่ ใช้งานยาก ก็น่าให้อภัย แต่ก็คิดว่า ซักวันมันต้องมีคนมาถามแน่ๆเลยว่าจะเอา XAML ไปใช้ยังไง

วันนี้เพื่อนมาถาม

นาย ม. says:
วีน ถามหน่อย สมมุติทำของใน blend เส็ดแล้ว จะใส่เข้าไปใน aspx ยังไง

โอ้…พระเจ้า ไมโครซอฟท์ทำสิ่งที่เราฝันไว้ได้จริงๆด้วย

หลังจากที่ Silverlight 1.0 ออกมาแล้ว 11 เดือนก็ยังไม่ได้เคยลองเอามาใช้แบบจริงๆจังๆซักที จะมีลองเล่นๆก็คือตอน BarCamp ครั้งนู้น แต่ว่าช่วงนี้ได้งานมางานหนึ่งซึ่งต้องใช้ Silverlight 1.0 ในการพัฒนาเลยได้ลองใช้ของจริงเลย

ปัญหาอย่างหนึ่งที่พบตั้งแต่เมื่อ 11 เดือนก่อนแล้วไม่คิดว่ามันจะแก้ไขได้ง่ายแบบนี้คือเรื่องการแสดงผลภาษาไทย

Recently, I have involved in a small silverlight project. As the rest of team has no experience with Silverlight but have played with WPF for a while, I suggest them to use shiny new Expression 2.5 with Silverlight 2.0 runtime at first. Unfortunately, using beta software is unbearable by the project owner aka client. Therefore we fall backed to the released Silverlight 1.0 runtime.

The development was progressed smoothly and all bugs we had found was fixed. With the help of Expression 2.5, the development was easier than earlier version. However, when the user acceptance testing had begun, a very serious bug was introduced in some user machines. No one in development team had seen this bug before . The only error message I had at that time was

ParserError- Unknown attribute Ignorable on element Canvas.
File: LoadingPage.xaml, line 8 character 3

This bug is obviously related to XAML parsing. So I fired up notepad and went to the problem line. Then I realized the attribute was added by Expression Blend 2.5. But I didn’t sure enough to conclude this was the cause as we, the development team, could run it perfectly both in development machines and my computer at home.

In order to reproduce the bug, I decided to uninstall my Silverlight runtime from the computer and found out the root of problem. Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 runtime do not handle XAML file as a normal XML file. They parse XAML file as XAML file. If you introduce any new namespace to the file, parser will struck and you will got parser error. Though you can use Expression Blend to create and design Silverlight 1.0, the XAML code still cannot be utilized by Silverlight 1.0 runtime. Furthermore, if I correct understand, Silverlight 2.0 javascript API has been changed and Rectangle has the actualWidth attribute as TextBlock element. Because my javascript also caused an error after I fixed the XAML namespace bug.

Since this new namespace was introduced by Expression Blend 2.5 Preview, this can be concluded that Expression Blend 2.5 Preview is not fully backward compatible with Silverlight 1.0. Although in the system requirement page states Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 is required, I think it is for development machine and should not require the 2.0 runtime to be installed in the client box. As this version is just preview, I don’t think this bug is Microsoft fault. I blog this for everyone who wanna try the software to be concern.

PS. This issue has been reported to Microsoft.

Last week, the new Silverlight 2.0 runtime and SDK have been released for Mix08. It is the first update to Silverlight 1.1/2.0 since last year Mix07. It took really long time for Microsoft to update this version as they want to build Silverlight awareness with their 1.0 release first.

Today, I emailed golive@microsoft.com to inquire further information about usage license of Silverlight 2.0. I got this email from the Silverlight 2.0 license agreement page and then I sent my question to that address. Within two minutes, what a short period, I got the reply.

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

golive@microsoft.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13): 550 5.1.1 User unknown

Did I do a mistake?

PS. Actually, I just want to know whether I can use Silverlight 2.0 in my part time project or not. It is just a Silverlight quiz game.