Good news for Windows Phone developers: it's just been announced that the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone will be getting a Mango update sometime in August.
This update will giving developers just a few extra weeks to tweak their Silverlight extensions before the Marketplace starts accepting Mango apps. No word on the exact changes the new toolkit will contain, but I think Jeff Wilcox will give us some goodies in there.
Currently my Mango update for Windows Phone fails with error code 80004005.
Answer from Microsoft:
“This is an error that is still being diagnosed at Microsoft. At this time there is no workaround for it. You should restore your phone to its NODO image and wait until there is a resolution for this problem.”
Some suggestions from Microsoft
On these crash / update issues there are two general approaches that you can try.
1. Try to apply the update using a different desktop / laptop system.
2. If a different system still doesnt' help, then remove any personal data from the device and perform a hard reset. Then try the update process again
A nice tool on codeplex to combine and minifier several JavaScript files:
Combres - WebForm & MVC Client-side Resource Combine Library – Home
<%= WebExtensions.CombresLink("siteCss") %>
<%= WebExtensions.CombresLink("siteJs") %>
HTML5 has introduced a lot of new fantastic elements that will be helpful to build better web pages. But the specification also deprecates a few tags that you maybe used in your web pages. So keep them in mind and use the more semantically correct tags or use CSS for styling.
Presentational tags that are deprecated:
Also the support for frames has been removed. That means that the following tags are gone:
A few other tags are replaced by better options:
In addition to deprecated tags there are many HTML attributes that are no longer valid:
Deprecated HTML attributes are:
If you plan on using HTML5 for your website, be sure to look at this elements and attributes to be compatible with the future and HTML5. You can use http://validator.w3.org to validate your page with the standards.
“Today, more than 250 million documents are shared through SkyDrive, making it one of the most popular ways to upload, view, edit or share documents on the web. Again, we worked to connect our services to the applications and devices you use every day. You can save your Office documents right to SkyDrive from Office 2010 on your PC and Office for Mac 2011, or you can upload documents from your web browser. Once documents are uploaded, SkyDrive works seamlessly with the Office Web Apps for accessing, editing and sharing docs in your browser or in the desktop client. And, thanks to SkyDrive, OneNote works seamlessly across your PC, phone (OneNote Mobile for Windows Phone and OneNote Mobile for iPhone) and web browser (the OneNote Web App).”
Don’t wait for your cloud - use Hotmail and SkyDrive today on your PC, Mac, or Phone
A new blog post in Silverlight Phone Performance team blog about new posibilities of decoding images in a listbox in a background thread per xaml definition with the new property CreateOptions.
For more details see: Off-thread decoding of images on Mango, how it impacts your application ? - Silverlight for Windows Phone Performance team blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
With Silverlight 5 beta there is an issue concerning the usage of the Silverlight Toolkit controls. For some of them (in my sample the MenuItem) you get a compile error
“The type or namespace name 'ContextMenu' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Windows.Controls' (are you missing an assembly reference?)”
Oops?! If you use intellisense to select the MenuItem control it exists. So definitively a bug in Silverlight 5. After a quick search a found also a hint in Microsoft Connect: Silverlight Forum: SL5 NumericUpDown control compile error | Microsoft Connect
XAML which produce the error:
<StackPanel>
<ListBox x:Name="ListBoxTest">
<toolkit:ContextMenuService.ContextMenu>
<toolkit:ContextMenu x:Name="contextMenu1">
<toolkit:MenuItem Header="Test"></toolkit:MenuItem>
</toolkit:ContextMenu>
</toolkit:ContextMenuService.ContextMenu>
<ListBoxItem Content="Listitem 1"></ListBoxItem>
<ListBoxItem Content="Listitem 2"></ListBoxItem>
</ListBox>
</StackPanel>
Workaround by setting the Menuitems with code behind:
New XAML:
<StackPanel>
<ListBox x:Name="ListBoxTest">
<toolkit:ContextMenuService.ContextMenu>
<toolkit:ContextMenu x:Name="contextMenu1">
<!--<toolkit:MenuItem Header="Test"></toolkit:MenuItem>-->
</toolkit:ContextMenu>
</toolkit:ContextMenuService.ContextMenu>
<ListBoxItem Content="Listitem 1"></ListBoxItem>
<ListBoxItem Content="Listitem 2"></ListBoxItem>
</ListBox>
</StackPanel>
Code:
public MainPage()
{
InitializeComponent();
var menuitem = new MenuItem() { Header = "My Menu" };
//menuitem.Click += new RoutedEventHandler(menuitem_Click);
contextMenu1.Items.Add(menuitem);
}