Making Silverlight Applications Available Offline

Ok, so I am a huge fan of the Silverlight development environment, C# and XAML represent one of the best UI design paradigms in computing today. Needless to say, I cannot thank the Moonlight project enough for bringing Silverlight support to Linux. The problem is, Microsoft either want’s me to develop a desktop application or a web-based application…. And only one of those is cross platform. Needless to say, if I restrict my WPF application to exclusively Silverlight-available libraries, I can get it to run on Linux. This is far from seamless, but in a pinch, it can be an option.

However, a far better solution would be to load Silverlight in the browser, while offline. (Taking advantage of the Silverlight plugin and its packaging). Utilizing Google Gears, I was able to serve up the compiled .xap file and run the Silverlight app in Firefox without a connection to the server hosting it. I haven’t had a chance to test how IsolatedStorage behaves under these conditions, or how Moonlight handles it (couldn’t get the latest 2.0 to build), but here is the VS2008 solution I used to get everything working.

Offline Silverlight Via Gears Demo

Finally! A Django IDE with Real Code Completion and Template Support

Now it seems like forever ago, but I have been on the hunt for a good Django IDE for a very long time. I have tried PyDev, Aptana, Komodo, TextMate, Vim, Emacs, Wing IDE and every variation in between, but was never satisfied with the featurset. I wanted complete python language support and completion, complete support for Django Templates, total HTML support, as well as complete Javascript (specifically jQuery) support. Most editors made the mistake of having support for some of those individually, but I can’t get javascript support inside of a Django Template etc.

The magical and awesome app that represents the first real attempt at a complete Django development environment? Netbeans!

I know it sounds crazy, but progress is being made, and while its a boatload of effort to get it built, and even then, not much of the promised featureset actually works. But those are just details, examination of the code available at:

http://code.google.com/p/netbeans-django/

shows some real work being done towards a Django project type. Moreover, a recent blog post from someone at Sun alludes to this support being available as soon as Netbeans 7.0.

Perhaps this is just another let down waiting to happen, but the existing Python code support is fantastic, and significant strides appear to already have been made towards the goal of total Django integration. If you want to try out the existing language support, just grab the Netbeans 7M2 build and install the Python plugin!

Oh No! Hacked!

I wanted to apologize, my Wordpress install was compromised. I’m restoring a backup now.