Why was the ASP Silverlight Control Deprecated?

10-14-2009 1:51 AM |

Anyone know why the ASP Silverlight control was deprecated?  It was so much cleaner: 1 line of code.  I've never known Microsoft to make is so we have to write more code instead of less.

Aaron

Re: Why was the ASP Silverlight Control Deprecated?

10-14-2009 3:35 AM |

 The ASP.NET Silverlight control made the default Silverlight application as it was generated by Visual Studio, dependant on IIS / ASP.NET, while this was not neccesary. To make people more aware of the possibility of hosting their Silverlight projects on pretty much any webserver they like, they took it out.

It also is more clean this way. There is just one way of embedding a Silverlight control in a page and that's through the object tag. That's much clearer to people just starting to tinker with their hosting pages.

HTH.

Re: Why was the ASP Silverlight Control Deprecated?

10-14-2009 10:32 AM |

Thanks for replying.

I see your point with the latter argument: having just one way to embed the control in the page does make things cleaner.

However, the first argument makes no sense, since the Silverlight ASP control only goes into an ASP.NET page, which by definition is already dependent on IIS / ASP.NET. 

However, I've discovered that, while deprecated, it's still usable.  I just added it to my toolbox by browsing to a different project's Bin folder, then I was able to drag it onto my design surface and use it as normal. 

The reason I prefer it, in addition to being less code, is that I like to pass all my Init Parameters from the code-behind, dynamically in response to various conditions.  While it is certainly possible to leave a placeholder field in the markup, e.g. <%=myInitParameters%>, and achieve the same thing, it doesn't occur as very clean to me.

Thanks for the response.

Aaron