Despite our best efforts Microsoft managed to release Silverlight 4 before we got our Silverlight 3.5 based Document Manager released.
Now I know we insisted we would not take advantage of the tempting new features that Silverlight 4 brings on the basis that we will never release the product if we don’t put the stake in the ground, but this time we made an exception.
Any application built with Silverlight 4 (and there are many already) will automatically install Silverlight 4 when it runs, which will also replace the Silverlight 3.5 runtime. This means our Document Manager has to work with Silverlight 4 and that being so, our developers could not resist picking at some of the quick benefits.
For someone who doesn’t understand the constraints of developing Web applications this is going to sound really lame, but we now have direct printing support for image documents so we have full control of the printing, page selection etc… all within Silverlight. Previously we had to deploy a ‘click once’ application which was not only a little clunky it also excluded us from non Microsoft platforms like the Apple Mac. Another nice feature is we can now drag and drop files from the Windows desktop straight into Document Manager, something which everyone takes for granted in desktop applications, but so nice to have on the Web. And lastly we finally get support for the right-click pop-up context menus. I actually remember when we wrote version 1 of the product in 1999 and had trouble explaining to users they needed to right click to get a context menu. Now everyone just expects it, so I was dreading launching a product without it.
See, I said it would sound lame, because these are things a normal end user would just expect to be there, but it’s a big step in terms of giving users the desktop feel to a web based application.
Tim