Any comments on MS Silverlight?

[xoggoth]

Planning a new educational CD, mostly interactives of habitats, conservation etc.

Interactives (similar to these) have been a minor part of our previous programs but I want to do summit a bit more sophisticated this time. I would like to stick to approach of DHTML running in IE browser inside a VB.net program, nice and easy to provide updates, but have some more complex effects in mind, like an ability to zoom in realistically on part of a picture.

Could use Flash but never found it very suited to complex images. Silverlight has an image zoom facility and other features. Wondering if anyone has any general comments on it, any major problems etc. Cheers.

[minestrone]

Dp will be along in the morning to tell you how fantastic it all is.

[AtW]

Go for Flash, it's much better supported and with upcoming "buy in" from mobile phone manufacturers it will become THE standard.

[DimPrawn]

It's all fantastic.

HTH

Actually, I've never used it.

[VectraMan]

Could use Flash but never found it very suited to complex images.

[krytonsheep]

I'd be tempted to do the whole thing in Flash(Flex) with no HTML at all.

[xoggoth]

Flash is good for cartoon like animations but I always found that with complex paintings or photos, even after tracing, I was sitting there twiddling my thumbs for half a minute every time I wanted to test a change. Dunno what it was doing.

[xoggoth]

Actually no probs just zooming in Flash. Div moves on background image, pass zoom and coords to same image in Flash movie inside the div, does what I want I think.

[xoggoth]

Here it is:-

http://www.gatekeeperel.co.uk/temp/zoom.html

That's my house that is.

PS IE only at mo.

[NickFitz]

PS IE only at mo.

Works for me on Chrome... well, it does something, which I assume means it's working

Not sure why though

Anyway, one thing you'll need to fix is at line 56 of zoom.html:

function mouseDown(e) {
    //get mouse x, y
    e = window.event; // this will fail

You need to change that to

e = e || window.event;

On browsers that implement events correctly (everything but IE) the event object is passed as an argument to the event handler; in this case you have it as the (e) on the mouseDown function, which is fine. IE, however, makes the event object a property of the window object; as this doesn't exist elsewhere, you are overwriting the event object with the value undefined. The above change is a quick way of saying "use the value of e that was passed in, or if there isn't one, use window.event" and will leave e with the correct object in a cross-browser way.

(You'll need to make the same change in a few other places too.)

Ah: it looks like Chrome shadows the true event object (passed as an argument) in the window.event property, which is why it's working there. I didn't realise they did that... learn something new every day