Saturday, February 21, 2009

Silverlight 2 GDR Available

This week Microsoft Release an GDR to silverlight 2 which included some minor fixes.

Here is a list of the main changes in the GDR (build 2.0.40115.0):
  • Fixes problems that were caused by Silverlight and McAfee scanning tools interactions
  • UI automation stability fixes, including:
    • graceful failures when attempting to use features that require .NET Framework 3.0 or 3.5 on machines that do not have either framework installed
    • improved Tablet support
  • Fixes an issue that arises when Mac users customize their environment by removing Arial and Verdana fonts
  • Fixes a known issue with Isolated Storage IncreaseQuotaTo method (see this post for more information)

The one fix which bothered me a lot is the graceful failures when attempting to use features that require .Net framework 3.0 or 3.5 on machines that do that nave either framework installed. Silverlight 2 has its own version of the .net framework why should it use .net 3.0 or 3.5 and of course the .net framework is not available for the mac.  Well after looking around some I found this in the comments on Tim Sneath's Blog
  " apologies - we could probably be clearer here on what this means. Essentially, this was a bug that could be triggered in certain situations where you were using the accessibility tools (e.g. magnifier) on Silverlight content on a machine without .NET Framework installed. In short, the bug was an accidental dependency that has now been removed." - Tim Sneath
For More info on the Update please check out Tim Heuer's Blog entry