Monday, October 25, 2010

FloatingWindow - Multi-windows Interface for Silverlight 4 - CodeProject

Introduction for the article
I see a tendency of some Silverlight applications to mimic traditional HTML-based web sites. That's not so bad if we talk about home pages, but surprising if we have to deal with RIA - Rich Internet Applications. Apparently, besides inertia in thinking there are some technical reasons for that. And the most evident one - complexity of the RIA.
Facing a need to design a web system with rich user interface, we shall make a choice between a page-by-page scenario (so familiar to web developers) and more habitual to end users desktop-like interface. The last one sets up tough claims to developers: functional designers and system analysts shall be able to design complex and usable front-end, architects - to elaborate interaction between all parts of the system, testers - hardly will be happy as well.
On the other part, Silverlight provides great features for building such complex systems. Any attempts to make them with ASP/Ajax/JavaScript/jQuery shortly turn into a nightmare. The only one feature richly deserving of more developers' efforts is multi-windows interface. You can easily find commercial packages, providing components for building such interfaces. But if you don't want to pay - take it for free :)
FloatingWindow - Multi-windows Interface for Silverlight 4 - CodeProject
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