Light up your Sivlerlight Apps for Win7 using Native Extensions for Silverilght (NESL)

There's a sweet new toolkit out called Native Extensions for Silverlight ( NESL ) . Silverlight friendly hooks to a number of native Windows 7 features you can use in your Silverlight applicatons. The libraries make it significantly easier to leverage Windows 7 from Silverlight. The libs also help with lighting up a Silverlight application with a minimum of effort for Windows 7 with items like jumplists and icon overlays. Source code and samples are here - https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/nesl .

One feature that really caught my eye was the Travel Journal sample. It uses the webcam plus Silverlight to capture VIDEO (not just screen shots) from Silverlight. I'd been wrestling with this myself and hadn't found a good answer. Into my lap, here comes some source code. Yes!

NESL includes the native runtime libraries and Silverlight libraries. There are also two sample applications - a childrens book with speed, and the video travel journal - with source code.

So exact what is NESL ? Its a set of libraries for Silverlight developers to access some Native Windows 7 features. Feature list for the product team notes the following features:
- Access accelerometers, light sensors, compasses, GPS etc.
- Access content from connected portable devices like music players and digital cameras
- Capture and create video from webcams and screen output
- Use speech recognition and text to speech capabilities
- Integrate with the Windows 7 taskbar (Jump Lists, Icon Overlays, Taskbar Progress etc.)

Enjoy. If you're in Florida, be sure to check out the new "Florida Silverlight Developers Group" at https://fla-sl-dev.groups.live.com . Florida folks (or alumni) only!