Sergey Barskiy's Blog

I could not have been more pumped about my Silverlight database project (See my post from a week ago for details).  I searched CodePlex for “Silverlight”, and now my project is number 20 on the list sorted by relevance out of total  622 projects.  It is also listed on Silverlight MSDN main page today: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/silverlight/default.aspx.  It got 68 downloads and 311 visits in just four days this week.  Awesome!

I just posted another update to this project on CodePlex.  Silverlight Database now supports encryption and compression.

I just installed Silverlight 3 last Friday.  One feature that I was hoping to see fixed was localization in Silverlight.  Ideally, I like to bind localized data, such as labels in XAML.  For example:

<UserControl.Resources>

<resources:ModuleResources x:Key="LanguageResource" />

then,

<TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" Margin="7,0,7,0" VerticalAlignment="Center" Text="{Binding Source={StaticResource LanguageResource}, Path=SomePropertyName}"></TextBlock>

This works great, but there is one issue.  Even though I mark the resource as public, any time I add a new value or edit and existing value, ModuleResources .Designer.cs gets re-written, and its constructor is marked as internal, not public.  If I run the app, I get the dreaded unknown type exception.  At that point I have to manually edit designer file and mark constructor as public.  Not a major problem, but I would like not to have to do this.

I just uploaded and published new CodePlex project I have been working on.  It is an Isolated Storage based database for Silverlight.  It supports multiple strongly typed tables, basic Linq based operations, addition and deletion of ranges of items, deletion of items based on condition.  You can also directly bind data to UI in Silverlight because base table inherits from ObservableCollection.  I am planning to put encryption and compression support into it next along with lazy loading of table.  Currently all tables are loaded into memory when database is opened.

Please take a look at http://silverdb.codeplex.com/

I would very much appreciate comments and feature requests related to this project.

Thanks in advance for the feedback.

I am planning to write some posts on new features in Silverlight 3.0.

I decided to start with the easiest one – out of browser support.  Start by creating new Silverlight application in Visual Studio.  Once it is created, go to properties of the Silverlight application project.  You will see this window:

Check “Enable running application out of browser”, then click on Out-of-Browser Settings button.  You will see this screen.

Once you fill in all the settings, you are ready to go.  All settings from this screen are stored in XML file called OutOfBrowserSettings.xml.  The actual fact that a particular application is enabled for out-of-browser support is stored in .csproj file.

Once you run the application, if you right-click on the application, you will see context menu with additional option – install on desktop.  If application is already installed, the option changes to remove application.

The installed application can be now run from the computer from the shortcut.  When you run the app from the shortcut, it is not going run in the browser, instead it is run in sllauncher.exe, a special program designed to host Silverlight application.  At that point, you do not have access to browser based functionality.  So, before you reach to HtmlPage.Window, check to see if application is running in browser.  You can do this by checking App.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser property.