Designing with Silverlight

Re: Thinking about Z

K2P2 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:25:11 GMT

Good info. By the way I marked it as an answer.

I rigged up my own LostFocus (and it's an interface) for Silverlight 2 stuff (couldn't get anything else to work there). I haven't looked into what has been put into Silverlight 3...

Thanks,

Re: Thinking about Z

mrjvdveen — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:09:07 GMT

Thanks for clearing that up.

I do get a better insight in what you mean.

Another approach to resolve this problem would be to have a single interface implementation that tells the Silverlight application that the user is doing something else (not sure if LostFocus on the top level covers it). Then a developer could write the response suitable for that application.

Apple has a completely different approach for this in their IPhone. If the user goes of and do something else, the application is completely stopped. If it doesn't stop within 5 seconds, it's simply killed. Now I don't like this approach as it may not be suitable for Silverlight applications. It could do with some sort of virtualization that suspends the application whenever the user goes off and does something else. In that case changes are the developer doesn't have to do anything.

Unfortunatly all of this is not available right now (except for the LostFocus event, but again I'm not sure it covers the load).

Re: Thinking about Z

K2P2 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:47:17 GMT

I appreciate your response. I was actually embarrassed by the way
that I phrased my reply to your initial post. I thought about
deleting it but then realized that others had already seen it.
So, I didn't change it to give you a chance to "come back".
(I knew your time zone is hours ahead of mine.)

Anyway, I edited it now.

I'm pretty sure that you cannot mark your own post as an answer.
Whoever marked it was, in my opinion, stating that your answer was
a resolution to the problem. If it is not an answer to the problem
then it is not an answer. And in my opinion it was not.

I agree that many will not find these sort of interfaces useful.

In the not too distant future I can picture a user of my site
having all of those things that I mentioned running on a single
Silverlight page, on a low resource Netbook, over some low
bandwidth wireless connection.

Plus they may then choose to download two other animations
(that, perhaps, I bought from Joe's Animations To Go).
One of these animations may be a snake that crawls around the other
objects on the screen. And the other is a plane that flies
around with a "floating" billboard that advertises "Joe's".

The user, very happy, has all of these things running and then
gets a Skype call. (Now they need, or want, all of the Netbooks
resources for other purposes. Maybe they are going to go to
another site and take dictation along with the Skype call.)
I need a way to tell everything on my page - with a press of a
button - to go quite. And then when the Skype call ends the user
can restart everything.

It seems that a good way to do this would be to require all of the controls
on my site to implement a known set of interfaces. (And I do despise interfaces.)

I'm going to start using interfaces like these. Hopefully there are some interfaces
around more sophisticated than my - of the cuff - gotta get going creations.

Re: Thinking about Z

mrjvdveen — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:36:15 GMT

So because I don't completely agree with you, I don't understand?

The point I'm trying to get across here is that one can expect a certain quality from component builders. I do agree that control over animations and communication is important. I just don't think that putting some interfaces in the framework will do the job or is even needed.

Also, if you start a discussion about something, how can my opinion be wrong? So why can't it be marked as an answer?

Re: Thinking about Z

K2P2 — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:00:48 GMT

I don't know who marked this as an answer.

[This section edited by K2P2]

When I get my web site up I will be able to show by example why these interfaces are - probably - very useful. And no doubt some others.

Re: Thinking about Z

mrjvdveen — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:17:02 GMT

IMoveable is not realy needed as similar functionality is already available in the Control class. In fact no control can choose it's own place, but is always placed inside a container (unless you're using a Canvas, in which case it's your choice).

A good control doesn't animate much by itself, but exposes the properties needed to animate it trough dependency properties or templating. This way the application developer can determine what is needed in the application.

No visual control should EVER communicate to the outside world by itself. If some company wants to provide with a full service solution I would expect them to provide me with a seperate class that handles the communication and which I can attach to the control myself. I would definitely expect to be able to enable and disable communication on that.

It wouldn't be a bad thing to have interfaces that expose functionality for the communication part. For the other parts, I would expect a 'controls company' to follow best practices and think about this. If they do a bad job with this, they wont sell much of their controls.

Thinking about Z

K2P2 — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:04:05 GMT

Since we are able to buy or otherwise load 3rd party controls dynamically into our web sites I may require - something like - the following interfaces to be present before I agree to use them.

Soon (maybe version 4 or 5?) Silverlight will be running on wireless hand helds and other low resource devices. Even now many PC's and laptops spend most of their time connected to the Internet via wireless. Not only that but there needs to be a way to control things like the Z order when a control decides that it wants to move around without asking my site for permission.

If several 3rd party controls decide to WCF something huge or something continuously then the wireless connection could easily get bogged down. Similarly controls that have cpu intensive animations may compete for that non-dual-core resource.

The user may decide to load, at run time, competing controls into my web site and it would be nice for the user to be able to asked everyone, or an individual control, to be "silent" while the user chooses to give priority to a currently important control. They may have a real time stock quote control with hundreds of tickers, or a video control, a chat box and a math control that is calculating pi backwards all wanting 100% of the cpu or wire. All of these controls may be visible at the same time and the only way to be able to ask for "silence" is if each control has known interfaces.

I despised all of the interfaces of Com and ActiveX but think that some may be necessary.

Does this already exist? Some very rough ideas:

// IMoveable
// bool CanResize
// double PreferredZ
// double PreferredW
// double PreferredH
// double PermittedZLow
// double PermittedZHigh
// bool AllowSelfPlacement
//
// IAnimate
// void Start ()
// void Stop ()
// void Pause ()
//
// ICommunication
// void Start ()
// void Stop ()
// void Pause ()
//
// Z -1,000,000 to 1,000,000 3rd party permitted area
// Z > 1,000,000 "system controls" that need to be on top
// Z < -1,000,000 whatever.