Build Native Apps in Silverlight with Sensors, Speech, Taskbar, Touch

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Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight (NESL) is a toolkit gives Silverlight developers access to cool Windows 7 features like sensors, speech recognition, portable devices, Windows 7 taskbar etc. from within their applications. The latest version adds support for full Windows 7 touch including gestures, manipulations and inertia as well as Windows 7 notification area integration, and improved portable device support. It also contains full API and developer documentation, and several new short feature demo applications illustrating usage.

Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight (NESL) version 2.0 is now available for download.

New Features

  • Touch Features
    • Gesture support
    • Manipulation processing support
    • Inertia processing support
    • Touch hardware information
  • Windows 7 Notification Area (System Tray) support
    • Add/Update/Remove notification icons to the notification area
    • Add/Remove notification information balloons
    • Respond to notification and notification balloon events
    • Add/Update/Remove context menus to notification icons
    • Respond to context menu selections
    • “Minimize to tray”/”Restore from tray”
  • “Single application instance” pattern support
    • Allow only a single instance of the application to run at any time
    • Be notified when a subsequent launch is attempted
    • Aids in applications that add themselves to the system tray, and hence needs to maintain a single running instance.

About NESL

While Silverlight 4 supports accessing COM automation components from elevated trust OOB applications, many Windows platform features are currently not available through COM automation. This makes them inaccessible to such Silverlight OOB apps. Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight(NESL) is an effort to incrementally build a library of components that expose select Windows 7 features through COM automation, making them easily available to Silverlight 4 OOB applications running with elevated trust. The current version of NESL provides access to Windows 7 features like Sensors, Portable Devices, Speech, Taskbar and more. NESL is made up of a set of COM automation based runtime libraries, Silverlight wrapper libraries usable from Silverlight 4 OOB applications, sample applications with source, API documentation, and a developer's guide.

Check it out at https://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/nesl .