Silverlight 4 beta just came out and is better than I expected. This is the first post of many about my experience with this beta and the road blocks I’ll find during my expedition. This version of Silverlight is without any doubt brilliant as well as all the features that are coming out in the release are beyond my expectations.

After installing Visual Studio 2010 I received this “successful” error message.

 

I installed Silverlight 4 beta without any issue, fast and straight forward.

 

After installation you can see the projects you can build, .NET RIA Services  WCF RIA Services are out of the box.

 

When creating a new project now you have the choice to target different Silverlight versions.

 

So far so good, issues I found in the beta up to this point.

• Roadblock testing the COM interop

Error    1    One or more types required to compile a dynamic expression cannot be found. Are you missing references to Microsoft.CSharp.dll and System.Core.dll?  

When adding a reference to the project I get an empty box.

If I look at the directory where the dlls are installed

“C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\Silverlight\v4.0”

I cannot find the Microsoft.CSharp.dll I can only find Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll to use. Where is the C# dll located for Silverlight 4? I wasn’t able to find it on my computer.

 

• Testing the Printing API

When using the printing api, I don’t get access to the raw image that is going to send to the printer, you can pass the objects to print and the API will take care of sending it to the printer, I was expecting to get access to the preview to be able to modify the output if need it.

 

• Hosting HTML content

I can only host HTML using the WebBrowser tag when running the Silverlight app in fully trusted mode. Otherwise if not I get a HTML disabled control.

<WebBrowser x:Name="MyBrowserControl" Visibility="Collapsed" Width="700" Height="500" />

Hope this helps to other people “playing” with Silverlight 4.

Cheers

Al

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