I haven't noticed any outcries of pain from the community, but then I haven't really seen much of anything as a result of the Silverlight 3 RTM. So...
What are your impressions?
For those that have migrated from Silverlight 2, was it a smooth process?
Have any issues been introduced into migrated applications that seem to be caused by SL3?
Are there any known issues with SL3 that weren't in SL2?
Thanks!
Things have smoothly updated for me. I've been using Shawn Wildermuth's modification of Amy Dullard's switcher batch file to allow developing for Silverlight 2 and 3 on the same machine for clients who are waiting to upgrade.
There have been two GDR releases since the official Silverlight 3 release.
I was unable to just build my SL2 project for SL3 as the new DataGrid doesn't databind to my types like the SL2 datagrid, and instead, shows nothing.
But it gets worse, due to a bug in SL2 where instructions get put in the wrong order for part of my code, I now have to build it for SL2 but run it under SL3. I haven't yet refactored the project to correct this unfortunate cross-version dependency.
If you have any thoughts on why the DataGrid no longer works, see my question that awaits an answer.
The transition for 2 to 3 was very smooth for us. We had implemented some missing controls (like SaveFileDialog) in the SL 2 version of the app that had to be removed when we upgrade to get it to compile, but that's a good problem to have.
We also use the Silverlight Toolkit and experienced some hiccups with controls that were moved from the toolkit into the full framework such as the AutoCompleteBox. The problems were easy enough to fix though and just required changing some xmlns entries.
To put this response in perspective, our Silverlight app is about 30k lines of C# + Xaml.
This was my impression:
A few weeks ago I saw a demo of Silverlight 3 at the PhillyDotNet User Group - WOW. Wow for business applications, not graphic applications. There is a learning curve, but you get a lot for it. For example, the demo showed a grid being bound to a table without needing to write any code.
Right out of the box you had sorting, editing, paging, etc. But it wasn't the lame stuff you normally get and then have to rework. For example the paging was smart enough to write the sql that would only bring back the 20 rows you needed for the page.
The demo continued with him putting a detail form on the page for editing. Again no code, but it was smart enough to know that it had the same datasource as the grid on the page. So as you were moving row to row on the grid - the detail form was showing the current row (and it was very fast).
Both the grid and the detail form were editable and as you changed a field in one the other would reflect the new value. The editing was smart enough to validate the field on its own. So you couldn't put a letter in a field that was an integer type, etc. It also limited the number of characters that could be entered based on the column size found in the database. All the date fields on the detail form automatically had a calendar next to them. You get the idea - no coding for any of this.
If this weren't enough, it can be used to build occasionally connected applications. So he showed how he updated a few records on a few different pages, had the option to revert back a field later (ctrl-Z), and then at the end submitted all the changed records to be saved.
Also, they said it works with Linq2SQL and the entity framework.
Here is a link to a demo (not the one I saw.) http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T40F