One area where Silverlight can plat an interesting role for your web applications is wherever file uploading to your server needs to be done. This may sound odd to think of it that way, but if you’ve ever done file upload in web apps (for larger sizes, chunking, etc.) sometimes it is no fun and involves a lot of Javascript. There is a video demonstrating on how you can do file upload with Silverlight 2 and also helps demonstrate the OpenFileDialog API within the runtime.
I remember seeing a multi-file uploader that Jose Farado had started back in Silverlight 1.1 days. It followed the UI inspiration from the Flickr picture uploader and I really liked it. Jose has been real busy since then and hasn’t had much time to update his older 1.1 samples to Silverlight 2, but a few others have started to emerge.
Over at the Silverlight community gallery, you can find a bunch of user-submitted content that includes full solutions, samples, helpful tips, etc. Right now you can find pointers to 2 solutions implementing multi-file uploading using Silverlight as a UI and controller in the process.
One is from Michiel Post and the other is from InetSolution, Inc. Both of them provide similar functionality. (NOTE: none provide full source code at the moment or have alluded that they will.) One thing that the team at InetSolution did after receiving some inquiries about their work was to write a bit about it in an ‘under the hood’ post about their effort so far.
UPDATE: Michiel Post has now updated the control and provided source on Codeplex.
I’d love to see either of these adapt the UI that Jose had implemented…but in the meantime, check them out!
