Silverlight Feature Requests
Currently, there is not a general location to log Silverlight feature requests (we’re considering adding something on Silverlight.net for this). Given the lack of a central spot, I’ve taken a few threads on the Silverlight forums related to a Silverlight wish list as well as some comments from ScottGu’s Silverlight 2 blog post and Scott Barnes’ blog and aggregated the requests into a single list with frequency counts. I left off things that have already been announced in Silverlight 3 but left on others that have not yet been announced. There are numerous reasons why something will or will not appear in the next version of Silverlight including customer demand, time to implement, business need, security concerns, performance concerns, ability to implement consistently cross browser and cross platform, etc. Therefore, items at the top of the list below won’t necessarily appear in the next version of Silverlight – however, it’s likely we’re engaged in solving those problems in one way or another. Net result is the Silverlight product team does look at these requests and they do have some impact on shaping future Silverlight platforms.
Feel free to continue to make requests and I’ll try and update the counts every month or so. One thing that would help for requests is some insight into the scenario for the request (if it’s not obvious). For example, if you need UDP, include details on your scenario for UDP (e.g. P2P game and if so, we may be able to solve that with a more targeted API). One area to call out specifically for scenarios is requests for WPF and Silverlight compatibility. In general, if you want a WPF feature in Silverlight, call that out as a Silverlight feature request vs. a compatibility request (e.g. want triggers in Silverlight). If you have a need to share resources between Silverlight and WPF, call that out as compatibility and let us know what you’re doing that requires shared resources (to better help us determine how to focus our work in this area).
Feature | Count | Comments |
Web camera and/or microphone input | 33 | Includes requests for just microphone as well |
Bitmap APIs | 26 | Support get/set pixels and/or rendering a XAML scene to a bitmap. |
Full 3D | 24 | Full 3D support (full 3D models) |
Printing | 20 | Printing APIs |
Offline and/or out of browser support | 16 | Support running Silverlight when not online (or completely out of the browser) |
Bi-directional text and/or complex script | 9 | |
UDP/P2P | 9 | UDP APIs generally for Peer to Peer support |
Rich text support | 8 | Editing and display |
Right mouse button | 8 | Ability to configure the right click |
Text quality | 8 | Improved text quality |
HTML Integration | 7 | Support HTML hosting (live HTML documents) and/or HTML translation |
Interactive designer | 7 | Support an interactive designer in Visual Studio |
Support more than BasicHttpBinding | 7 | Most common request is for WSHttpBinding |
Improve Silverlight/WPF compatibility | 6 | Mostly feature requests for either Silverlight and/or WPF |
More controls | 6 | Random/general requests |
SaveFileDialog | 6 | |
Data and/or property triggers | 5 | |
Reporting services | 5 | |
Synchronous web service calls | 5 | |
ADO.NET DataSet/DataTable | 4 | |
Alpha video | 4 | Chroma key support |
Clipboard support | 4 | |
Drawing APIs (immediate mode) | 4 | |
Element name binding | 4 | |
Improved DataGrid | 4 | Several different requests |
Local relational database (SQL) | 4 | |
Modal dialog | 4 | |
Mouse wheel | 4 | API and support in existing controls |
Selectable text | 4 | |
Assembly caching | 3 | Want a framework for downloading/managing assemblies |
Credentials/auth | 3 | Requests for networking stack and ASP.NET type integration |
Custom markup extensions | 3 | |
Multi-target DLLs for .NET/SL | 3 | Build a business object DLL once for both .NET and Silverlight |
Multi-touch support | 3 | |
Path Animation | 3 | |
Speech and better audio decoder | 3 | |
VisualBrush | 3 | |
9 Grid | 2 | |
Better keyboard APIs | 2 | Platform independent keycode |
Better SEO | 2 | |
Binding support to anonymous types | 2 | |
Direct database access | 2 | OLEDB/ODBC equivalent |
Flow panel | 2 | |
GIF support | 2 | |
Global/dynamic styles (skinning) | 2 | |
Integrated CTRL+F (in page search) | 2 | |
Sound APIs (equalizer) | 2 | Includes looping |
TileBrush (Image Tiling) | 2 | |
XPS Support | 2 | |
64-bit platform support | 1 | |
Android support | 1 | |
Better N-tier support | 1 | Improved data access |
Better SharePoint integration | 1 | |
Block style text | 1 | Bulleted lists, paragraphs |
Cell based animation | 1 | |
CollectionView | 1 | |
Color management | 1 | |
Digital/XAP signing | 1 | |
Double Click event | 1 | |
Drag and Drop | 1 | Between the desktop and Silverlight |
Full 5.1 sound | 1 | Currently fold down to stereo |
IDataErrorInfo | 1 | |
Inverse kinematics (bones) | 1 | Flash 10 feature |
MediaTimeline | 1 | |
Multi-binding | 1 | |
Navigation model | 1 | Includes browser history integration |
Validation controls | 1 | |
XPATH support for data binding | 1 |