24 hours just isn’t enough
Well.
I don’t know where to begin.
Silverlight 2 has been released, as most of you know already; I’ve been spending a lot of time with it, trying to incorporate as much of the framework/features as I can in one application – and it’s actually coming along just fine; the idea is to show some of the added value a rich application can bring to administrative/business applications, while at the same time showing off as much of the features/possibilities of Silverlight. Some things I’ve been playing with/am planning to do: push/pull communication between different instances of the same app through WCF; multi-user app; theming; saving state; … next to the obvious: styles&animations.
This, off course, takes up a lot of my free time; especially since I tend to switch designs frequently (I’m not a designer, so there’s always something in my designs I’m not completely satisfied with ;-)), but by doing so I continue to learn more and more of this tech with almost endless possibilities.
And then: the weekend happened.
It’s like going to sleep in World, v1.0, and waking up in World, v1.5. The Silverlight Toolkit has been released. A new version of XAML Power Tools has been released. Blacklight controls have been released. Dave Crawford released a beautiful glossy "theme".
By the way, I write "theme" ’cause as far as I experienced, there is no such thing as real dynamic theming in Silverlight. The Toolkit adds the possibility for implicit theming (simply put: you don’t have to give every style a key anymore – it is now possible to make a general themed style for a certain type of control, eg a Button), but dynamic theming (applying a new theme at runtime) isn’t possible. I think by combining SL with some AJAX, and effectively reloading your complete SL app, things like this should be possible (or more specific: you can make it feel like it’s possible) – but this implicates having to reload your complete application with a different app-file. We’ll see how that works out.
Anyway, all of that in just a few days – at this moment, it feels like 24 hours in a day just isn’t enough. 🙂
