Here are my slides from the presentation I did yesterday for the UK SharePoint  User Group.

I'm doing a presentation tonight for SUGUK on Silverlight in sharePoint and wanted to demo some of the Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint.

Naturally I hit a few issues along the way so I thought I'd pass a few tips on.

A major requirement is to have .Net 3.5 and AJAX running on your SharePoint site. If you configure AJAX by hand as I did check this MSDN article for configuring AJAX but use 3.5.0.0 as the version number.

I configured AJAX by hand but there is also a CodePlex feature that can install AJAX on all your WFE.

It will also help to have Visual Studio 2008 and the Silverlight SDk installed on your dev box.

The first issue is that none of the XAP's as shipped will work on my machine. You'll get an error like this

checking the XAP files shows the shipped one has this as the first line of the manifest.

<Deployment xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007/deployment" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" EntryPointAssembly="SL.XAML.Navigation" EntryPointType="SL.XAML.Navigation.App">

but if I recompile the source I get

<Deployment xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007/deployment" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" EntryPointAssembly="SL.XAML.Navigation" EntryPointType="SL.XAML.Navigation.App" RuntimeVersion="2.0.30226.2">

The missing RuntimeVersion seems the key here, looks like the U2U folks were running a slightly different build of chiron the XAP compiler and certainly the Silverlight 2 runtime on my machine wont run a XAP without it.

So the fix is to recompile the Silverlight Applications and redeploy the XAP to the ClientBin directory in your IIS website directory.

Second and more bizarre is the Navigation Sample. If you try to run it you get an error about being unable to load the Assembly.

The problem here is that the PublicKey for the SL.Controls.Navigation.Dll is wrong in the MasterPage.

The MasterPage has 4aec304184eb9a69 when the DLL has bb99f30c0098259c.

The Fix is to change the MasterPage Register TagPrefix line to bb99f30c0098259c. You can use SharePoint Designer or uninstall the feature change it and then reinstall, reactivate.

This will happen when you dev with an internal snk file which has your company private keys in it and then decide you've got to change it before you ship. I've done exactly the same thing myself, it really helps to test it on a single machine outside your company first.

And IT LIVES

While preparing for the presentation on Silverlight and SharePoint next week I've just discovered that the current Beta 1 of SilverLight 2 is unable to call SharePoint's native webservices.

The technical reason is that the WSDL SharePoint generates includes an asd:any declaration which is translated by the proxy generator as requiring the XmlElement class but Silverlight does not support this class. So you're not able to call GetList or GetListItems in Lists.asmx for instance.

I've posted on the Silverlight forums about this but the reply I got from Yavor Georgiev (Program Manager - Connected Services) was not clear as to whether this is a planned feature for SL 2.

There are a few ways around this which I'll go into in the presentation but none are very pleasant prospects.

There's probably still time to get this feature in v2. The best thing is to let MS know this is an important issue by adding support on the thread. Also worth keeping an eye on the Silverlight Web Services blog.

I'm really stoked to be presenting at the UK SharePoint user group meeting in Basingstoke on the 27 March about Silverlight and SharePoint.

This presentation will explain what Silverlight is, what the benefits are over standard web development and how Silverlight can be hosted in and integrate with SharePoint.
With few slides and plenty of demos I'll walkthrough the creation of a Silverlight 2.0 video browser application that uses data from SharePoint and then deploy it to SharePoint. I'll also show how a commercial Silverlight 2.0 product for SharePoint is put together.

The other presentations are

Architecting a Highly Available MOSS Farm - by Lewis Baldwin, ICS,  Head of Infrastructure and Support

Governance: Protecting your SharePoint Investment by Symon Garfield, ICS,  SharePoint Practice Lead

The good folks at ICS solutions are hosting us at their offices in Basingstoke (http://www.icssolutions.co.uk/pages/howtofindus.aspx).

Just post a reply with your full name on this thread http://suguk.org/forums/thread/8918.aspx (registration required)

The minute we began working with Silverlight 1.1 we knew Web Application Development would never look the same again and we've been working on a Silverlight Application for SharePoint over the last few months using Silverlight 1.1 (which is going to be supercool btw) and have been waiting longingly for the Beta 1 of Silverlight 2 to appear.

Like a hitech version of the Dance of the Seven Veils newly minted Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie has just posted the first revealing posts about the upcoming SL 2 release at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/22/first-look-at-silverlight-2.aspx . (scottgu.com is where the pictures are posted to and is not accessible when writing this post)

Sporting a subset of WPF features such as controls, databinding, layout and styles but most importantly supporting .net code running client-side its ironic that while WPF itself has gone nowhere (dont believe me - check the market www.jobserve.com, skills keyword WPF, EU jobs 51, yes thats 51 jobs (perm and contract) in the whole of the European union) Silverlight is set to introduce a whole slew of developers to XAML.

Microsoft has just thrown a very big stone in the web application development pond and the ripples are going to be huge.