Microsoft have announced the Beta release of Silverlight 4. How dare they, we haven’t got our Silverlight 3 release out of the door yet, although we’re doing our first install into a client environment this week. Silverlight 4 addresses some of the frustrations our developers have had with Silverlight 3, although the workarounds have pretty much been developed already, version 4 offers some nice enhancements and gives us some good roadmap opportunities for a future release. Don’t worry, we’re not going jump into version 4 until we’ve actually shipped the version 3 product !
So what are these nice enhancements?
One of the biggest is the ability to run ‘out of browser’ in a trusted mode. Version 3 allowed out of Browser running ( the application doesn’t run within the web browser ) but it had all the same restrictions on interaction with the host machine as the ‘in browser’ mode. The new Trusted mode allows the Silverlight app to access the local file store, interact with other applications using .COM and other standard features taken for granted by normal applications. For document manager this opens the door to richer integration capabilities and less user interaction requirements to confirm simple things like file saves (normally considered a threat for Web applications).
Users can now open and save documents on the local machine using a file open / save dialog. Sounds obvious doesn’t it, but try writing a document manager without this capability!
The Silverlight application can now access the local machine printers so we can print documents. Again it sounds obvious but quite a challenge for the developers without it.
Files can now be dragged onto the Silverlight application from the windows desktop. Another feature taken for granted by non web app users, but highly desirable for something like Document Manager.
Right Click. This was one of my biggest bug-bears with Silverlight 3, the fact that we could not present a context sensitive right click menu and that right click always provided the default Silverlight menu. Well with v4 we now can, so the familiarity of the rich client users can now be reproduced in the Silverlight version. Hooray.
For the non technical of you reading this it probably sounds like I’m getting over excited about what appears to be relatively minor features, but they will make a big difference to the functionality and usability of the Silverlight Document Manager, and re-enforces our decision to adopt Silverlight as a platform for the product.
For more details on Silverlight 4 Beta take a look at http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/
Tim