First steps with offline Silverlight and Live Framework I wrote a simple test application for Silverlight running on Live Mesh. It is an interesting scenario, which enables Silverlight applications to run offline, in the style of Adobe Systems' AIR. I wrote a to-do list that stores its data in the cloud, I added some items online, and deleted and added some items offline on another …
Hi Tim, I am doing something similar but until your article have not been aware of Silverlight/Livemesh offline and your approach souds very appealing to me. I am currently writing some software (trying to write it at least!) on the CTP and it has been a bit of a headache due to much of what you stated in the article. When I have something worthwhile I was planning on writing up a step-by-step for CodeProject, but it will be mostly about Azure, ASP.NET, and SDS (not silverlight or livemesh). Since it looks like you have a bit more of a headstart on offline Silverlight/Livemesh would you be willing to share a step-by-step with the rest of us? I already have the CTP invite and am about 1/10th of the way to deploying a somewhat stable simple alpha app.
Many thanks!
You can also see a comment I posted to a cloud Reg item here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/12/cloud_computing/
A nice article, but you did throw us in at the deep end. It would have been nice to get an overview of what exactly Azure/Mesh offers in terms of offline functionality, and how you interface with it (is it a browser plug in, a COM object, or an app?). I don't know Mesh / Azure, so this one left me having to look stuff up in between paragraghs.
I did try writing an offline client without Azure (just a win app) that used silverlight, however found that there was no way to bridge between the silverlight app and the windows app without either using a COM object or creating an httplistener and messaging with web requests over the back ip address. It would have been nice to get further info on what Azure offers compared to this, rather than just having a go at the MSDN forums speed.
...basically,
"Yes absolutely, SilverLight is cross platform, though because the Xplat angle is all just a bit of a marketing scam, and really we'd much rather you use Windows, that's all we'll be supporting currently."
Nice.
SilverLight & AIR are just proprietary crap.
The XUL+XBL+XPCOM combo is by far the simplest & easiest to use, the best supported (& documented!!), the most open and standards compliant & therefore the only real logical answer to cross platform development. Period.
"we could only test XP SP3/Vista SP1 and IE7"
Ahh, the traditional Microsoft definition of "cross platform". It used to be "well, it works on both 2000 *and* XP", now "oh it works on XP *and* Vista".
Admittedly it's a preview, but if silverlight was fully cross-platform compatible this Mesh app should run just the same on the Mac as the PC. It'd be ironic if moonlight gets ported to osx and is more compatible with silverlight than the official silverlight for Mac.
I have to stress to anyone at Microsoft reading this, you CAN'T try to use your cloud services to try to extend your OS share. That'll will just lower the number of developers and users available for your cloud rather than helping maintain your eroding OS market share.
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