Reading Deeper into Scott Guthrie's Silverlight 1.0 Announcement

I was reading Scott Guthrie's blog entry that announced the Silverlight 1.0 release.  He preps everyone for the Silverlight 1.1 changes in a short blub.  It looks like he's hinting at features that everyone really wants:

It will support a WPF programming model for UI - including support for an extensible control model, layout management, data-binding, control skinning, and a rich set of built-in controls.

This seems to imply:

  • "Extensible Control Model": What 1.1 has today, creation of your own controls that are usable in XAML.  Good, but not news.
  • "Layout Management": Sounds like Grid, StackPanel and other containers from WPF. This is very good news!
  • "Data-Binding": Very very nice! 
  • "Control Skinning": Templates?
  • "Built-in Controls": Buttons, TextBox, etc.?  Cool.

This would allow Silverlight 1.1 could complete with Flash/Flex on a level playing field which is cool.  I am not sure its necessary, but I am in the minority.  I fear tha the plugin will become bloated, but so far its stayed pretty svelt so I have my fingers crossed.

What do you think?

Comments:

I have to say I was dismayed when I found out that there was no built in capacity for text entry in Silverlight. I'm just starting playing around with Silverlight, so I'm now working on figuring out how to at least fake text entry. News that this functionality will eventually be there is welcome by me.

As far as buttons, you can build those pretty easily right now so I agree that the need isn't that huge and we do want to avoid bloat.

Scott Guthrie posted the following in the comments of his post.

"The Text Input control and focus/tab support will be coming in future Silverlight 1.1 refreshes. That support isn't in the alpha today - but we will be supporting it in the future."

and further down

"Unfortunately I don't have an exact ETA on when text box focus support will come online - although the textbox control itself will show up in a refresh later this year (I'm not sure if focus management will be there immediately or come afterwards though)."

Matt Casto (Posted Thursday, September 06, 2007 )


 



 
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