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Update on Feature Requests

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I am continuing to aggregate the requests and have the updated and abbreviated list below (removed items with less than 1 or 2 requests). A couple of comments based on some of the requests:

I am tracking 3D even though ScottGu announced Silverlight 3 will support 3D. For Silverlight 3, we are introducing the ability to treat 2D objects as if they are in 3D space. You can view this support as being able to draw content (XAML) onto a postcard and then position that postcard in 3D space (this is also called perspective transformations or non-affine transformations). What I am tracking for “3D” is the ability to do full 3D – which is the ability to have full 3D objects/models (e.g. a 3D box vs. a postcard) and rotate/shade/light that object.

I have not included an item for bitmap effects as we have announced plans to support a pixel shader model in Silverlight 3 and Silverlight will include a few stock shader effects.

There are some things we are continually focused on and one is performance. For performance, we are scenario focused – meaning we pick the most important scenarios and then optimize those end to end. For general performance requests, including requests for hardware acceleration, it would be helpful to understand what scenarios you feel do not meet performance expectations.

There are numerous requests for mouse wheel and there was a comment that suggested the reason we do not support this is due to a security concern. To clarify, the reason we do not support this in Silverlight 2 is that mouse wheel events are not exposed to Silverlight in all browsers (see this post for more details). We continue to look for a consistent way to work around this issue.

Feature Count Comments
Web camera and/or microphone input 33 Includes requests for just microphone as well
Bitmap APIs 28 Support get/set pixels and/or rendering a XAML scene to a bitmap.
Full 3D 26 Full 3D support (full 3D models)
Printing 22 Printing APIs
Offline and/or out of browser support 17 Support running Silverlight when not online (or completely out of the browser)
Rich text support 13 Editing and display (and flow, multi-column, inline hyperlink)
Text quality 12 Includes requests for knobs on anti-aliasing
Bi-directional text and/or complex script 10  
Right mouse button 9 Ability to configure the right click
UDP/P2P 9 UDP APIs generally for Peer to Peer support
Interactive designer 8 Support an interactive designer in Visual Studio
HTML Integration 8 Support HTML hosting (live HTML documents) and/or HTML translation
Support more than BasicHttpBinding 8 Most common request is for WSHttpBinding (session support)
Clipboard support 7  
Improve Silverlight/WPF compatibility 7 Mostly feature requests for either Silverlight and/or WPF
More controls 8 Including navigation tree, multihandle slider
Selectable text 7  
Improved DataGrid 6 Several different requests including support for Virtualization
Mouse wheel 6 API and support in existing controls
SaveFileDialog 6  
Data and/or property triggers 5  
Reporting services 5  
Synchronous web service calls 5  
ADO.NET DataSet/DataTable 4  
Alpha video 4 Chroma key support
Custom markup extensions 4  
Drawing APIs (immediate mode) 4  
Element name binding 4  
Local relational database (SQL) 4  
Modal dialog 4  
Assembly caching 3 Want a framework for downloading/managing assemblies
Binding support to anonymous types 3  
Credentials/auth 3 Requests for networking stack and ASP.NET type integration
Multi-target DLLs for .NET/SL 3 Build a business object DLL once for both .NET and Silvelright
Multi-touch support 3  
Path Animation 3  
Speech and better audio decoder 3  
VisualBrush 3  

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 27, 2008
    PingBack from http://blog.a-foton.ru/index.php/2008/12/28/update-on-feature-requests/

  • Anonymous
    December 28, 2008
    Hi Joe, This is a feature request for which I haven't really seen yet much interest and I'm quite sure that once SL becomes the de facto choice for writing the client-side of any SaaS platform, it will be tremendously needed. The scenario is quite simple. While online, a Silverlight application stores data in the Isolated Storage. The Internet gets offline (or the live services fail), the user is informed that there is no live connection and only the local data is available, the newly inserted data will be temporarly saved in the Isolated Storage and synchronized automatically with the live services once the connection is back (or services are ON again). This is extremely important to allow the user to continue working with the application as usual without feeling much pain. I have seen requests for "Offline support" but from the brief descriptions it wasn't clear whether this offline support will solve the above issue. It seems that, as described, Offline support actually means the ability to start the SL application without having an Internet connection. This is very important and I subscribe to it but the big question is: if the SL application is started offline, will the local data stored during the online sessions in the Isolated Storage still be available offline? This should be a must in order to enable the above scenario ... So, to brief the requests:

  1. Offline support - the ability to run the SL application when the Internet connection is OFF.
  2. Offline support - the ability to consume the local data stored in Isolated Storage the SL application was online.
  3. Allow WPF applications to consume the data stored in the Isolated Storage by a SL application. Thanks, Florin
  • Anonymous
    December 28, 2008
    Hello, I'm a East-Asian developer(actually Korea). I've posted a sort of complain about FontSource behavior at silverlight.net forum: http://silverlight.net/forums/t/60095.aspx However I didn't get any response, because of my horrible English, I gusss. :( I'm not good at English so I'm going to summarize that I want to tell you.
  • Most of East-Asian font is too huge to integrate into an Assembly.
  • So, I can't use FontFamily option like "Font.zip#Font Name".
  • Now, the only way to change Font is to set FontSource property by code every single element which I need. Because FontSource is not supported by Control so it's not inheritable.
  • It's too messy. Why don't you support FontSource from Control, just like FontFamily does? Thank you, Gongdo
  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2009
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2009
    Hello, Features request:
  • Printing
  • Right mouse button
  • Mouse wheel
  • Credentials/auth
  • Synchronous web service calls Thanks
  • Anonymous
    January 18, 2009
    I wish to vote for:
  • Multi-target DLLs for .NET/SL
  • RSA/DSA encryption
  • Alpha video and/or video frame grabbing (great for animation compression)

  • Anonymous
    January 18, 2009
    Also, ability to work offline within the browser when the Internet connection is not available (temporarily) is also great (Like Google Gears)

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2009
    Sign me up for full 3D support. I have built some models with X3D which has a lot of things in common with Silverlight/XAML (XML format, RenderTransform/RotateTransform, Animationtimers, Opacity, etc.) Problem with this is the limited plug-in coverage (Flux, Vivaty, Octaga, etc) and logo display. If Silverlight could support this standard it would be a good argument for convincing my boss an creative director to use this great technology.

  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2009
    Drag & Drop of files (for use in fileupload). I understand security is an issue, but maybe 1 yes/no popup would be sufficient.

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2009
    Request for Mousewheel support. I have built 2 Silverlight controls and I get feedback that people miss this.

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2009
    Add 1 to Clipboard support for me as well.

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2009
    I mean the ability to copy a piece of a HTML page (incl. IMG tags) from the browser and paste it in my Silverlight Editor control. Like a contenteditable DIV where you get the HTML pasting for free.

  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2009
    wsHTTPBinding. Over and above any other request by far. You guys are pushing Silverlight as a LOB application platform, using WCF as a service layer - but without Silverlight support for the WS standard, it's either a complete no-go or else we're going to have to write loads of code to do message security, anti-replay attack, username authentication, etc etc etc Also, can I request more blog postings, videos, process guidence etc around the are of Silverlight and WCF communication? There's plenty of stuff around showing off the (impressive) eye candy - but once we'd got over that, we now start looking at the fundamentals - and it's hard to find anything decent on securing the communication between Silverlight and WCF.