Wednesday, April 09, 2008 10:05 PM
rrobbins
Disgusted With Silverlight
Today I worked on a Twitter client in Silverlight. I got pretty far on this project but had some problems creating hyperlinks in the text. I tried the Hyperlink tag in the XAML Pad and it worked there but it would not work in my Silverlight project. I did some research on the Internet and found a web page with a hyperlink example. Incredibly, this example would have you handle all the mouse events and even the text decoration to make a TextBlock act like a hyperlink. This web page also directs you to "See the documentation for TextDecorations property of the TextBlock object in the Silverlight SDK".
http://www.silverlight.net/quickstarts/silverlight10/controls.aspx
So I check out that help topic in the Silverlight SDK and find the example for "Simulating a Hyperlink using the TextDecorations Property". WTF!! I could not believe this. You mean the technology that is supposed to revolutionize the Internet with rich client web applications can't even create a simple hyperlink? I have to go to this much trouble just to simulate a hyperlink? Unbelievable!
Well...I was going to put what I managed to get working on my web site, without hyperlinks, but I cannot open the project in Visual Studio 2005. I could open the project at work but not at home. When I try to open the web page without using Visual Studio I just get a lot of errors.
OK I've managed to deploy it on my web site but don't be surprised if it throws up some errors:
http://www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com/Silverlight-Twitter.html
Silverlight is definitely proving to be far more trouble than it is worth.
Filed under: Silverlight, XAML, Visual Studio 2005