Disgusted With Silverlight

Today I worked on a Twitter client in Silverlight. I got pretty far on this project but had some problems creating hyperlinks in the text. I tried the Hyperlink tag in the XAML Pad and it worked there but it would not work in my Silverlight project. I did some research on the Internet and found a web page with a hyperlink example. Incredibly, this example would have you handle all the mouse events and even the text decoration to make a TextBlock act like a hyperlink. This web page also directs you to "See the documentation for TextDecorations property of the TextBlock object in the Silverlight SDK".

http://www.silverlight.net/quickstarts/silverlight10/controls.aspx

So I check out that help topic in the Silverlight SDK and find the example for "Simulating a Hyperlink using the TextDecorations Property". WTF!! I could not believe this. You mean the technology that is supposed to revolutionize the Internet with rich client web applications can't even create a simple hyperlink? I have to go to this much trouble just to simulate a hyperlink? Unbelievable!

Well...I was going to put what I managed to get working on my web site, without hyperlinks, but I cannot open the project in Visual Studio 2005. I could open the project at work but not at home. When I try to open the web page without using Visual Studio I just get a lot of errors.

OK I've managed to deploy it on my web site but don't be surprised if it throws up some errors:

http://www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com/Silverlight-Twitter.html

Silverlight is definitely proving to be far more trouble than it is worth.

4 Comments

  • Try using the Silverlight "HyperlinkButton" control:



    This handles the click event and navigation for you.

    Scott

  • HyperlinkButton is not available in Silverlight 1.0. I agree that Silverlight is pretty ridiculous as far as 1.0 goes.

  • thank you very much
    These contents are very complete.
    You gave me a very good help.


    I send you my @mail
    di.ric@tin.it

  • You're referencing the inability to include hyperlinks in line with a textblock eh? I think this is pretty ridiculous too. I found some examples stacking textblock and hyperlinkbutton elements in a horizontally oriented stackpanel, but I still get odd spacing and am required to build relatively complex xaml in order to emulate a simple paragraph of text with hyperlinks and images.

Comments have been disabled for this content.