Each quarter, new MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) candidates are awarded.  January 2010 is the first awards of the year and so I present the new/moved/re-awarded Silverlight specific MVPs:

• Alex Knight (@agkdesign) – started SilverZine and is a XAML designer extraordinaire
• Cigdem Patlak  (@crocusgirl) – doing some really fun stuff with Silverlight Show and a talented developer/designer
• Rodrigo Diaz Concha (@rdiazconcha) – doing some really great things in our Latin America countries!  Gracias!
• Jeremy Likness (@jeremylikness) – seriously, go subscribe now.  Jeremy is too smart for us all.
• Roger Peters (@smartyp) – cranking out a bunch of Windows Phone 7 stuff in Silverlight lately and also is a great contributor to the community.

The following have been renewed this year – congratulations and keep up the good work!

• Andrea Boschin (@aboschin)
• Dave Campbell (@wynapse)
• Vikram Pendse
• Eric Ambrosi (@eric_ambrosi)
• Joel Neubeck (@jneubeck)
• András Velvárt (@vbandi)
• David Kelley (@davidjkelley)
• John Stockton (@johnnystock)
• Jonas Follesø (@follesoe)
• Emil Stoychev (@estoychev)
• Alex Golesh (@devcorner)
• Braulio Diez Botella (@braulio_sl)

Congratulations to everyone above and keep up the great work of showing us what Silverlight is all about!

A while back I had sent out an update on Twitter that I was sitting in a meeting reviewing some “top issues” for Silverlight as reported through various channels (official support, forums, social media outlets, blogs, incoming emails, etc.).  It really seemed to be a holistic view of incoming feedback from all over the place.  People asked if I’d share the issues we discussed and I thought it would be interesting to see what people are facing.  Interestingly enough, almost all of these are solvable and, at least in my mind, not ‘issues’ but learning opportunities (for developers *and* us).

So here they are…I think some may surprise you.

WPF and Silverlight feature parity

It’s a little weird to call this one an issue with Silverlight, but this was seen requested more often in these areas that it is worth calling attention to.  Some of the genesis of this angst comes from an expectation that WPF applications ‘just work’ in Silverlight and not understanding the areas of the subset in both XAML and the .NET base class libraries (BCL).  The other part is more of a future suggestion to bring the XAML platforms closer together.  Pete Brown had a good post in December last year sharing thoughts on this future roadmap: The Future of Client App Dev.  It is a good read.

In the interim, note that those parity type items people are requesting are being looked at.  Specifically, I’d encourage you to search for already logged suggestions and/or provide new ones of specific features you might like to see in Silverlight.  We’ve set up a place for you to do this at http://silverlight.mswish.net.  There is a growing list (yes, I need to ensure I prune the crap out more frequently) that the team looks at for futures planning.  This is for suggestions and not bugs.  For ways on providing feedback to the Silverlight team see my post on the subject.

Again, it is hard to call this an ‘issue’ but I wanted to list it, and call out that we are aware of this desire.

Silverlight and WCF configuration issues

As a beginner to Silverlight you’ve likely experienced this.  Start a new project, write a service on the web project, do Add Service Reference in your Silverlight project and you start coding away.  Life is wonderful, you’re getting results and you polish your application.  Then you move it to production and you start getting the dreaded NotFound issue.  You bang your head on a wall for a while trying to figure out why.  If you are lucky, you remember that the reference was to localhost, most likely, and you simply change it to the appropriate endpoint URI and you are on your way.

But this is frustrating right?  There has to be a better way?  Or perhaps you are having x-domain issues with WCF/Silverlight and you need a way to debug?  Or perhaps everything actually is configured and you have legitimate exceptions but they all surface as NotFound and you want to strangle someone?

Luckily, there are methods to solve these issues.  Yavor, the lead PM on these features for WCF/Silverlight, has commented on these specifically:

• NotFound and faults
• .clientConfig service URI issues
• PollingDuplex
• Debugging cross-domain errors

This is one of those issues that has answers, but they apparently are not surfaced well enough (or you tell me?  do people just not search the docs?).  I would encourage you to read Yavor’s post on the documented solutions and the plans/inquiries about the future and how things should work.  As an example, we are considering making the fault configuration the default by modifying the Silverlight-enabled WCF Service item template.  Take a look at his post and make some comments about the plans!

Installation and deployment

I’ve seen this a lot.  People saying that they have Silverlight installed and they went to a website that prompted them to install Silverlight, so they did (again) and they went back and were prompted again…rinse, repeat.  The other is that people (your users) aren’t getting prompted for upgrades properly or they aren’t working well with applications.

It is true that we put a lot of responsibility on the developer to customize the installation experience for the developer.  I’ve written about this a few times.  In fact, I called out what I believe to be the best encapsulation of the tenets of a good experience in what Netflix does: Silverlight Install Best Practices.  We have also posted a whitepaper on the Silverlight community whitepaper area for the Silverlight Installation Experience Guidance which basically incorporates these tenets into guidance and sample code as well.  This is a helpful whitepaper to understand the events of the plugin in upgrade situations and how easily you can handle them.

Most of the support issues we see are because the application isn’t properly handling these situations.  One could ask that why we, Microsoft, aren’t providing a better default template that includes all these best practices.  We’ve wrestled with this idea quite a bit actually.  In the end, we didn’t feel right now we could come up with a universal application template that would meet the needs of all app developers (different sizes, use cases for their Silverlight app).  Some things are easier such as media applications coming from Expression Encoder, for example, where we know the size and use of the application.  In fact, those templates have already been enhanced for a better experience than the default install badge.  It is still on our list to provide better out-of-the-box templates in Visual Studio, but we balance that with other features that are on the list for prioritization for customers.

In the end, this is a very solvable issue and again it appears that discovery of the solution could be better.  Help me understand how we can better surface this?

Silverlight browser support matrix

A little bit associated with the above install/deployment issue, we see reports of people saying Silverlight works with IE but not Firefox and also people saying “Silverlight doesn’t support Mac” and other claims.  Let’s be clear.  In the simplest terms we support:

• Windows: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome (SL4 only)
• Mac: Firefox, Safari

The full support matrix with explicit versions, etc. is available here.  Where things aren’t working when they should (i.e., Firefox on Windows) that is things I want to know about.  There was an issue early on with Firefox and our detection script that application developers in some apps may never have updated.  This would have triggered the install badge instead of realizing it is already there.  However this was a Silverlight 2 issue and long since fixed.  Again, if there are apps that aren’t working in the supported matrix, I want to know about them!

Aside from that, we’ve never hid our support matrix.  On top of that Linux clients are provided support through the Moonlight project from Novell (and the Mono team).  Yes, at present Moonlight isn’t at 1:1 version parity with Silverlight, but they are aggressively working as fast as they can.  In fact we ensure that our detection script identifies Linux clients and points to the Moonlight installer, where appropriate!

Again, I think this is a solvable issue that is done with arming of information.  If we aren’t providing enough, where do you think I can do better?

Media-related errors

Are you seeing the 4001 AG_UNKNOWN_ERROR message too much in your media application?  The support issues coming in on this front are primarily for DRM-related situations.  In the most recent Silverlight release (4.0.50524.0) we enhanced the DRM-related media errors to provide a better differentiation to what they are and separate them from other issues.  These will now surface in 6000 series errors.

Even further we are making further diagnostics to other media-related error codes in a future servicing release to get even more granular based on feedback we’ve already provided. 

If you are a developer of a media-related application and are seeing media 4001 errors, please upgrade to the 4.0.50524.0 build and let us know if that helps.  If it doesn’t, please contact me and I’ll send you some diagnostic code to help get us better information about what is surfacing.

Summary

I personally found it interesting how ‘low bar’ these issues seemed to me.  Like I said, I believe them all to be solvable with existing solutions that apparently aren’t as discoverable to developers.  Some are actually in the docs though, but I have to admit as a developer myself how much I usually consider docs a last resource.  If you have ideas of how we can better surface these types of information, please share it.

So there you have it…the more top related issues to Silverlight (aggregate through various channels). What do you think?

As I write this in my hotel room now on the eve of me leaving the state of Arizona, I am left with mixed emotions.  Most of them frankly are deeply personal which I’ll spare you the details.  However, it is here – specifically in the Phoenix metro area – that I grew the most technically. 

NOTE: Yes there are some Microsoft employees that live outside of the ivory towers of Redmond.  However, and to be frankly honest, when you work for a product team -- *currently* – it is fair to say that growth could be limited when you aren’t near the decision makers.  It is for this reason that I’ve decided to relocate.

Allow me to reminisce a bit…

Out of college I actually worked for my fraternity (Delta Chi for those interested).  I was immensely interested in educational leadership and traveled the northeast area of the country visiting undergraduate and alumni organizations to share my knowledge learned in the world of educational leadership.  It was through a freak accident…getting lost in Pittsburgh while trying to find Duquesne where my life took a twist.  I wasn’t paying attention and ran a red light in an intersection.  My car was met by another – otherwise known as ‘getting t-boned.’  Both of us survived fine although my car did not.  Through a series of other events within weeks I quit that job and was left jobless and headed back to Arizona where I had to beg my father for help (not really, my parents are great).  I also had met a lady that had really caught my attention.  I wanted to marry her quickly.  With no job, no prospects and no home, I asked her parents for her hand in marriage.  Yeah, I know. 

Anyway, I took a temp job with FHP Healthcare in Arizona (an HMO) doing data entry during their busy season (open enrollment).  I was informed that I was the 4th temp they brought in in as many days and they were way behind in the applications.  If I couldn’t cut it they weren’t going to wait.  I found this to be odd because data entry seemed really simple to me. 

SIDENOTE: My father was a programmer and always involved in IT.  I lived around it.  He brought home his ‘portables’ (basically a 27-inch TV dumb terminal) a lot and I was always around it.  I pretty much grew up around computers although never really programmed them much beyond BASIC.

Before lunch on that first day I had completed the stack that was provided me…about 1500 applications if I recall.  I told my supervisor who effectively called ‘BS’ on my and went to verify my work.  She was amazed and brought me in to the big boss’ office.  He asked why I was working as a temp and what my skills were.  Of course, my degree in Criminal Justice didn’t shine for an IT job, but he saw something in me.  He took a chance that I’ve been grateful ever since (thanks Charles!).  That week I was offered a full-time job as a junior analyst for the sales and marketing systems and worked under the wing of a programmer (our system was PowerBuilder at the time).

Fast-forward about 2 years I got the chance to join a consulting company, one of the biggest/best in the valley in Phoenix.  To date, it still has been the most fun place to work.  Ah the days of ordering random crap on Skymall to “test” the e-commerce updates (our company built their first site).  It was there that a group of us started to host impromptu meet-ups of like-minded geeks in the Microsoft world…’user groups’ as I would learn them to be called.  Some more driven folks like Scott Cate and Dan Wahlin put some more structure, organization and ‘official-ness’ behind them and the Arizona .NET User Group was formed a long while ago.  I’ve been involved in some way ever since.  I have fond memories of organizing and participating in DevDays events, working with partners and customers, building some of the most unused systems for large companies :-), and just having loads of fun working with great people.

It is through community that I’ve learned so much of what I know and, perhaps more importantly, what I don’t know.  My paths and aspirations eventually brought me to Microsoft about 5 or so years ago and here I stand now – headed to the mothership to be closer to my team.

I’m immensely grateful for those in the Arizona technical community that I’ve met and learned from over the years.  There is a lot of smart people here (well I think they are smart but I still can’t figure out why we all sit in the 115F temperatures!!!) that I admire a lot.  Whether it be Microsoft technologies, Linux user groups, Ruby, whatever the tech, I’ve learned a lot and I thank you.

The decision to leave Arizona was much more challenging on personal levels, of course, but along with my personal friends exists my ‘professional’ ones who I’ve had just as much fun with over the years.  I’m not sure if my paths will bring me back to Arizona in the near future, but until then – thank you Arizona.

I’m still working with Silverlight, still working with the community and hopefully taking a broader feature role in the coming versions.  My responsibilities haven’t really changed, but some were questioning my move so I thought I’d drop a note.  In a nutshell to Silverlight folks: your feedback has a smaller distance to travel from my inbox/blog/forums to those who make decisions!

I just got back from speaking/attending the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo, Norway.  It was a great time and a well run conference.  Like many other conferences I found myself looking for two things I wanted on my mobile: the schedule and a map/guide for the city (I’ve never been to Oslo).  You see every time I take a trip, here’s what I do:

1. Search for an app that contains the schedule (or offline version).  Ideally allows me to build my schedule and gets updates for changes
2. Find the metro/map/guide for the city because I know I’ll be lost.

Rinse, repeat.  I do this every conference, trip.  And then I end up with a multitude of apps installed that are single purpose throw-away.  Seesmic Desktop platform has spoiled me in thinking of this eutopia of a single-purpose shell which can have pluggable content.  For Seesmic, this is my ‘social media’ shell.  But I want more now.

You see, at MIX10 there was a great mobile app that was created by Chris Hardy.  It was written in MonoTouch, nonetheless!  It pretty much did everything I would want in a conference app.  But after MIX it is kind of dead.  Uninstall. (Yes I know it looks like someone repurposed the app for a REMIX event, but same purpose…delete.).  Same thing after my trip to Berlin last year.  After that trip I didn’t need the metro rail map anymore.  Delete.

But then I head to Norway.  I want the Oslo guide/metro schedule.  I want a conference app.  There is both, but again they are separate apps.  Is my vision that far off?

I have been bugging Chris to modify his app to be more of a shell.  I like everything about the structure and think he should make it a basic “Mobile Conference Guide” app – enabling conference providers to publish a feed of their data and personalization (i.e., for background, icons, etc).  As an end user I would have one app installed.  I could then launch the app and (perhaps) browse a catalog of known events (organizers can publish to a specific feed location) or enter a URL to a conference feed that conforms to the data specification.  I don’t care if that data specification is OData, RSS, whatever – just have the app define a standard.  What conference provider wouldn’t love to just worry about providing data and not worry about providing the app?!  Am I way off here?

Same goes for travel guides (I’m guessing this one is out there and I’m just not finding it).  I have an app called “Metro” that allows me to subscribe to metro/public transportation for various cities in a singular app.  That’s great, but what about city guide information?  Restaurants?  Museums, etc.  I want more.  You know I want the Rick Steves travel app (does it exist and I’m just an idiot) with in-app purchases for more guides for other cities…all offline.

Anyhow, just a rant as I uninstall, yet again, two very useful apps after a trip.  Please bombard Chris with requests :-).

In the Silverlight world, there are two types of “cross-domain” things that may leave some banging their head against a wall for a while.  The first involves making network-based calls (WebClient, HttpWebRequest, etc) to services hosted on a domain other than the one that is the site of origin for the XAP.  This is solved by ensuring the service provider enables a clientaccesspolicy.xml file for their service.  More information here: Cross Domain Policy Files with Silverlight.

NOTE: “site of origin” is a term you might see a lot with regard to Silverlight.  This refers to the URI domain of the Silverlight XAP file.  For example: http://apps.mysite.com/sources/coolapp.xap might be a URI that you have for an app.  The site of origin in this is apps.mysite.com (more specifically it is actually the entire URI usually when people refer to this term).  This might help when you read things about cross-domain issues.

The second issues is one of hosting Silverlight applications (XAPs) on your site that are from a different domain.  What I mean here is that your site (www.coolwebapp.com) has an <object> tag for Silverlight plugin that has the Source parameter set to apps.anothersite.com/foo.xap.  This is essentially the cross-domain hosting situation.  What happens in this situation is that the plugin loads but the app does not, presenting in just a big blank space where the app should be.

A recent head-banger sent me a note and I sent him my items to check on how to solve this.  I thought I’d share.  When I see issues with this, I normally tell people to check for one (or more) of three things:

HTML Access

If the Silverlight application is doing anything to work with the HTML DOM of your hosting page, this is the first place to look.  Don’t know if this is happening?  If the Silverlight application uses System.Windows.Browser anywhere it likely does.  By default the tools and templates from Visual Studio generate the bar minimum <object> tag.  There is one property of the plugin, EnableHtmlAccess, that is set (essentially) to true for same-domain applications.  However, for cross-domain applications, you will need to opt-in for this adding this parameter to the <object> tag:

   1: <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2">

   2:   <param name="source" value="http://apps.somesite.com/foo.xap"/>

   3:   ...

   4:   ...

   5:   <param name="enableHtmlAccess" value="true" />

   6: </object>

By doing this, you are granting the XAP access to the HTML DOM of the hosting page.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

XAP MIME type

When the plugin loads a XAP from another domain, it checks what the MIME type is.  If it is not a valid Silverlight type, it won’t load the app.  This is a security mitigation.

If you are loading a cross-domain XAP, make sure the site delivering the XAP is delivering it with the appropriate MIME type: application/x-silverlight-app.  By default this is set in IIS7/Windows 2008, but not in IIS6/Windows 2003.  You can put this on the server level or the application level…wherever you feel comfortable, just as long as it is delivering it with the XAP. 

Obviously on non-Windows servers, this will not be set at all regardless of the version.  If you are getting a XAP from a Linux/Apache server for instance, the server administrator will want to add the type.  This is simple and you can do it at the global level in the mime.types file.  Or on a per-site basis you can do it by editing the .htaccess (or creating one) in the directory level that will serve the XAP and add:

   1: AddType application/x-silverlight-app xap

If you are using a CDN like Azure or Amazon S3 or something else and they don’t have the type associated, you will need to be creative.  Most CDNs enable you to set the MIME type (or Content-Type) on the file during upload.  For Azure, Silverlight should already be there.  For something like S3, tools like CloudBerry Explorer enable this feature for you (and actually already have a list of types built-in to their tool).

This situation (identifying the MIME type) can be quickly tested using a tool like Fiddler to see what the response and Content-Type are being delivered.  Fiddler is an indispensable tool…go get it, it’s free.

ExternalCallersFromCrossDomain

This is the black hole property right here.  This one is probably a last resort for most.  This property, in the Deployment node of your AppManifest.xaml file controls Javascript and HTML DOM access to scriptable objects defined in the XAP.  Like EnableHtmlAccess, for same-domain situations the setting is irrelevant, but in cross-domain hosted XAPs, the default is the NoAccess option.

To enable this you’ll need to manually edit the AppManifest.xaml file to add the ExternalCallersFromCrossDomain attribute.  There are two properties: NoAccess (default) and ScriptableOnly.  You’d want to *add* the attribute and set it to ScriptOnly.

   1: <Deployment xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007/deployment" 

   2:             ExternalCallersFromCrossDomain="CrossDomainAccess" .../>

REMEMBER: This is is only if you need to.  Read the documentation to see if this applies to your scenario.

Summary

Sometimes debugging this stuff can be tricky. Having the tools and knowledge makes this easier to track down. Not all situations involve multiple of the above and if none of them fix it, then you might have another issue. Hopefully this helps provide some places to look.