LA.NET [EN] : ASP.NET, Silverlight

Xaml and Media controls: giving them a new chance

luisabreu — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:35:36 GMT

A long (long) time ago I've downloaded one of the ASP.NET future CTPS and was really annoyed with the Xaml and Media controls. Why? simple: they injected object tags on the page instead of generating JS code to perform those operations. The problem: you got one of those nasty "click to activate" messages when the page was hosted on IE.

Now that we know that the "click to activate" will be gone, it's time to give these controls a second chance. Dave has already written a cool post on it and he promises to return with more Silverlight posts.

Xaml and Media server controls

luisabreu — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 20:57:11 GMT

Fritz Onion has a post on his blog about these two controls. Unfortunately, my experiences with these controls didn't run very well and I don't agree with him when he says that they provide a cool model to integrate silverlight content on the page.

My main beef with them is that, unless they've changed something and have release a new version of the future bits, then those controls inject an object tag on the page instead of using js to create the new object on the fly (like the demo pages that come with silverlight do). The problem with this approach is that you get a "disabled" control which gives you a message saying that you must click to activate the control.

iAgain, it's one of those scenarios where i really can't understand why they're doing this when they've already have so cool js wrappers that could be easily embedded on the dll that has the control...

ASP.NET future bits: the Xaml server control

luisabreu — Mon, 21 May 2007 22:13:38 GMT

In one word: needs improvements! If you use this control, you'll be able to insert a Silverlight control in your page. As you might expect, the server control lets you parameterize several of the properties of the Silverlight control. However, it'll generate an object or embedded tag (depends on the browser), which means that you'll get that annoying rectangle with a message box that says that you must click to activate the control. Now, this is really a bad call since injecting javascript from the server on the page is really easy and would completly solve the problem (can anyone explain why hasn't the silvetlight.js file been embedded in the dll so that the render of this control would only generate the div used as a container and inject the traditional createSilverlight method? sometimes, it looks like MS likes to complicate things).

btw, I've done some digging and I've found why MS added this "feature" to IE: guess what? it's because of legal issues related with patents. It's ironic, right?