Silverlight 5 Wishlist

This article is reposted here

The MS Program manager need to watch some experienced developers new to SL try to develop a silverlight app. It’s painful. (I’ll put down how many hours I couldn’t bill due to these)

1. Use the browsers’ CultureInfo/locale info automatically. No code should have to be written. (0.5 hour)
2. LOB controls (DataGrid and DataForm) in SL Toolkit should include a BusyIndicator by default, and should be bound automatically. (0.5 hour)
3. Provide just ONE standard LOB blueprint, for the simplest Departmental Database. You’ll find enough surprises to fix a lot of issues. The following lists the bugs one developer found over several days.
4. NavigationPage and security requires a lot of tweaks. e.g. “Keep me logged in” is async, so we cannot do security checks until user state is known.(5 hours)
5. Provide a fix for DomainDataSource with ComboBoxes, Kyle McClellan’s fix should be rolled into the toolkit. See [url]http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kylemc/archive/2010/06/18/combobox-sample-for-ria-services.aspx[/url] (3 hours)
6. I don’t know why, but DataForm ComboBoxes requiring datasources have to be loaded from a DataSource inside a DataForm control. (3 hours)
7. Package with a SDK with a deployment troubleshooting tool. I’ve got a troubleshooter for basic WCF, but still need some help pulling out information from the IIS metabase. (5 hours). The WCF stack needs to provide better logging than just 404, and it should log in a hosting scenario where users do not have access to a lot of tools. See [url]http://www.redmountainsw.com/wordpress/archives/asp-net-4-0-silverlight-hosting-tweaks[/url]
8. Figuring out SQL server issues with my hoster set up. The thousands of linux hosters have a basic system for accessing the database. There is no consistent way of doing this with ASP.net. You need to provide a standard hosting setup that the hosters can copy into their environment. One-Click is good, but you need to make this as easy as possible for the hosters. (2 hours)
9. SqlWebAdmin needs to be hosting friendly.(1 hour)
10. The toolkit controls need to support a “print” mode. It is so easy in HTML, and we miss being able to print things for free. Specifically, it will strip away scrollviews, replace textboxes which overflow in screen with an expandable textbox. If we can mark UIElements as non-printable, then logos etc can be stripped off. It doesn’t matter if pages don’t break properly. We would like to see SL being back to parity with HTML.

If you are a MS Program Manager, feel free to contact me and I’ll give you a list of basic issues that SL needs to address before working on fancy features.