When the May ASP.NET Futures release came out last month, I was somehow under the impression that the asp:Media and asp:Xaml controls were specific to Silverlight 1.1. They were certainly compelling, but if they worked with 1.1 only, less so.
When
Brad Abrams posted a comment to my
Zen of Silverlight blog entry saying it gets even better with these controls, I decided to revisit them again, and then of course realized that they were both ASP.NET Ajax controls (just like controls built in the ASP.NET Ajax toolkit). It then hit me that this technique of embedding xaml in a custom ASP.NET Ajax control and exposing properties, methods, and events to interact with the Silverlight content
is the incremental adoption story for Silverlight in ASP.NET applications. As Brad puts it in his
recent post from TechEd, these controls provide
islands of richness in ASP.NET Ajax applications.
So if you're looking for a way to bring some Silverlight content into your ASP.NET applications, I'd highly recommend trying out the asp:Xaml and asp:Media controls in the
ASP.NET Futures release. Furthermore, if you want to build some nice reusable, instrumented Silverlight content, follow the model of these two controls and create a custom ASP.NET Ajax control that instantiates a Silverlight host and embeds Xaml content as embedded resources.
Posted
Jun 07 2007, 02:04 PM
by
fritz-onion