What's your top feature request for Silverlight?

Question

I'll take away the obvious one here: mic and webcam support. Other than that, if you ran the Silverlight team, what would your highest priority be for Silverlight v.Next?

Disclaimer: If we get some good responses, I'll pass them along to folks I know on the Silverlight team.

UPDATE: The best place to report Silverlight feature requests now is the UserVoice site: http://silverlight.uservoice.com/

Answer 1

• SQL Compact Edition running on the Silverlight CLR
• Support for Triggers
• Support for resource dictionaries

Also, since you brought up Webcam I have to plug my Silverlight 2 Webcam Support POC. It's using Flash interop and allows you to capture PNG stills from Silverlight. I guess it's more a fun example of Silverlight, JavaScript and Flash interoperability than a really useful webcam solution. But you can do fun things with it. In my most recent blog post I use the webcam support to capture still pictures for a sliding puzzle game.

http://jonas.follesoe.no/WebcamInSilverlight2NdashSlidingPuzzleGame.aspx

Answer 2

Full cross-platform support for Windows, Mac and Linux with complete feature parity for each OS. ;)

Answer 3

I'm actually on the silverlight team.. so I can also pass along suggestions.

Not really sure how much i can divulge, but webcam is being worked on.

I can definitely agree with the desire to gen wav files. I wanted to speed up/slow down sounds for a piano demo..

Carl - that's the plan. Though linux support is being handled by the mono team.

Brian - while parity with WPF isn't a goal, subset compatibility is. Silverlight's 'minimality' is indeed at times pretty annoying.

Answer 4

I've been working on a business app in silverlight for the past couple of months, so I'm biased more towards that direction. These are my problems with 2 beta 2, I have no idea if they will be solved with the final version.

1. Printing. Some kind, any kind, I don't care, as long as I have some control over it. A business app without printing is a hard sell, and no, the print from the browser is not good enough.

2. Ability to deploy updates. Currently I can't easily post a new version of the xap and expect the users to get it. That's very nearly a show stopper. All the suggestions to make this work I've had don't seem to work or make things worse. Adding a query string did nothing. Renaming the xap with a version number will wipe the iso storage and adding a no cache header to the website breaks PDF's in IE which is part of my work around for #1.

3. Right Click, double click and scroll wheel. Where are they? Sure I can hack on it and make it work, but that stuff should just work. The only excuse I've heard is some mice don't have a second button. I hope that's not the reason. If so, let's get rid of everything but the text box so the lynx guys don't feel bad.

Answer 5

Okay, fine, I'll throw another one out there: audio file support. I'd love to be able to generate WAV data on the client and immediately play it. As it is, Silverlight only plays WMV and MP3, neither of which is simple (legal?) to create without a per-client license.

Answer 6

Parity with WPF.

Triggers (event triggers and data triggers too), Binding to other elements in xaml, Multi-part value converters, and DynamicResources.

Commands... maybe if they got time.

Answer 7

For them to fix the ugly text rendering.

Answer 8

Printing ability. I have been working on a business app since the alpha version and the biggest problem is that I have to create PDF files on the server and download them to the client so they can be printed. Some of them get really big. If I could generate them on the client and print that would solve all my problems. Otherwise, SL 3.0 will work great for my app.

Answer 9

SQL Compact Edition running on the Silverlight CLR

I thought the point of silverlight was to provide a small, embedded runtime in the browser.

Adding every kitchen sink (like SQL or any kind of ORM library, or parity with WPF) is just going to cause what happened with .net 3.5. Nobody will develop for it because they don't want to burden their end users with a 200 megabyte download

My Top Feature Requests for silverlight would be:

1. The smallest download size possible. Last time I looked I think it was at 4.6 meg? This is too big.

2. One click installation with no disruption. Don't make me navigate off to other sites, reboot my browser*, or DARE reboot my computer.

3. Backwards compatibility. I've been to several silverlight sites now which don't work because they require 1.0 and I have 2.0 beta something, but I can't install 1.0 because 2.0 stops it. This is stupid.

* yeah I realise it might not be possible within the confines of firefox etc, but still. This is the end goal.

Answer 10

Streaming Video over RTSP. Sadly, Silverlight 2 only supports HTTP Streaming, and telling it to use mms:// only signals it to do streaming video over HTTP.

Answer 11

Tiff support.

This would be huge for businesses that need to access scanned documents from a central server - Silverlight is much easier to deploy than Windows Forms components hosted in IE, and pretty much all document imaging is done with Tiffs.

Answer 12

The XAML Hyperlink element inside text blocks. Google "silverlight text Hyperlink" to see how many complex and ugly workarounds are being posted for this omission. Notice how the best one doesn't have any line-breaks in the text, because the WrapPanel that it uses doesn't deal with them.

Failing that, I could do with at least one of the following ways to make the workarounds more palatable:

• A FlowDocument so that I can work with multiple text blocks inside a larger document
• A good way determining which text run is under the mouse click when the user clicks somewhere on a text block. In general - given the click X, Y co-ordinates, find out what XAML element was clicked upon.
• Mouse events on text runs, not just on their containing text block.

I have asked how to do this as a question here, and there is no satisfactory answer, which is very disappointing..

Answer 13

• Basic HTML / Rich Text support.
• WPF's Inline Hyperlink.

Answer 14

Mic + Webcam support...must for web dialers Printing support...for LoB apps Silverlight running on Symbian (S60 atleast) and iPhone

DataSet/TypedDataSet...with Control Binding...Visual Studio generating WCF based Adapters (like currently it does for WinForms / Sql). Lot of LoB developers will get attracted!

Answer 15

I would just like to add that Silverlight does have its own uservoice site were you can add and vote for feature suggestions: http://silverlight.uservoice.com/

This was set up by the Silverlight product team and they are actively watching the suggestions on this site.

Answer 16

What about some way to be able to wrap Silverlight around AIR and be able to run it as a client in a multi platform way... I guess this is more of a request to the Adobe team rather than the Microsoft one, yet I should be cool!

Cheers!

Answer 17

I know this is probably difficult to implement in Silverlight since it is probably resource intensive, but it would be nice if the VisualBrush was supported.

Answer 18

Dropdown boxes and a more simple way to highlight text in a text box!

That's what I would want right now anyway.

Answer 19

Let me add another vote for the ability to generate/edit/play wav files (or at least a low-level raw bitstream.)

Answer 20

Ok. I would like to see full support for modal dialogs. Without this building serious line of business applications cannot be seriously considered. This needs to behave exactly the same way Modal dialogs behave in the win forms world, meaning not just simulating a popup, but halting code execution and returning to the code when the modal dialog is closed.

Answer 21

That automatic update of new silverlight code sounds like a big problem.

Also right click should be there. It's up to the dev to deal with users who don't have a 2 button mouse. I'm betting that 90% of users have a 2 button mouse. And mac users have Cmd click to emulate it don't they? If you cover windows and mac that's 97% of the market or something, that's as good as it gets.

Answer 22

Two things:

• Being able to do an HttpWebRequest without the whole request body loaded into memory on the client
• Being able to do socket connections to the source server port (e.g. 80 or 443)

Answer 23

I'm not gonna be that guy that lists off all the features of WPF. I'm trying to be tactical here.

Here's my list:

1. Full Trust Mode (i.e. file system access, full screen text entry)
2. Direct access to the printer
3. ItemContainerGenerator promoted from the SL Toolkit to SL. This class is so ridiculously important for building custom ItemsControls.
4. Drag & Drop from the Desktop
5. Better RelativeSource Binding Support
6. ScatterView & other touch optimized controls
7. Receive notification of assembly updates at runtime (so that users that don't close the browser can receive code updates).

Answer 24

I have a request that may be solved in one of two ways (as I see it):

1. An automatically-scaling Canvas control (i.e. when you resize the canvas within Blend it would actually change the scale of the canvas w/o crazy fly-off-the-screen, infinity-crash side effects. And programmatically, if the width/height of this control were set, the contents of the canvas would also scale within those bounds.
2. An alternative way of doing the above would be a Path Panel. As it is now, Paths scale just the way I would like them to in Blend. I would think that a Path Panel would also scale just like individual Paths do. You know, like a Path Collection of sorts.
3. How about NOT clipping Path Strokes when they go outside of the width/height bounds? Or somehow giving an option (checkbox) to enable/disable this feature?

Answer 25

I wonder someday will it be possible to develop a website, using silverlight, which implements features like the ones available at TinyChat and TokBox.com [sorry I am new user and cannot post more than a link per post :-(], namely: chat rooms with multiple audio and video streams coming from mics and webcams (using Flash).