14 DAY TRIAL // Developers looking to make the best out of their Silverlight applications deployed on top of Windows 7 can leverage a new collection of resources offered by Microsoft free of charge.
Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight are designed to allow devs to kick up a notch the UX of out-of-browser apps by tapping the unique features that make Windows 7 what it is.
Native Extensions are available through the MSDN Code Gallery, along with the documentation and guidance necessary for the resources.
The promise from Microsoft is that NESL will continue to evolve moving forward, and that this is just version 1 of the Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight.
“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,” reads an excerpt of the NESL’s description.
There are no less than six Windows 7 application programming interfaces covered in the first release of NESL.
By turning to the current version of NESL, developers will be able to create Silverlight 4 apps that take advantage of a variety of Windows 7 features via such APIs as Windows Sensor API, Microsoft Speech API, Windows Portable Devices API, Windows 7 Taskbar Integration, Webcam Local Encoding and Window Capture and Window Message Interception.
“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,” Microsoft added.