We are excited to announce the availability of Technology Preview of eclipse4SL for Macintosh platform. The download is available directly via Eclipse Update Manager. Here is the Update site URL http://www.eclipse4sl.org/update/mac

All the features that we support in the M2 release for Windows are supported in Mac Platform as well. Some of the key features include Project Management, XAML Design & Editor, C# Editor, Code Completion, build system.

We are excited to share with you RIA development experience on MAC in the form of a “Customer Technology Preview” version. Please give it a try and give us your feedback on the bug tracker, and join the discussion on the user forum.

Here is a wonderful demo proposed by Jean-Christophe Cimetiere. It gives an overview of the developer experience of creating a basic Silverlight application in Eclipse, shows how collaborating with a designer could work, and finally you’ll see a sample Silverlight application talking to a Java web service:

This demo is hosted on YouTube as well:

Happy new year to all!
We are pleased to deliver our second Interoperability Guidance (By the way, did you check our SOAP guidance?).
http://www.eclipse4sl.org/documentation/userdoc/html/webservice/restlet/index.php

We look forward to your feedback and feature proposals. Of course, if you are building Silverlight applications accessing Interoperable Web Services, please share your experience (User Forum).

As announced in the previous post (New release 1.0.0 M2 is available), we have worked on providing guidance about interoperability between Silverlight and Java Web services.

Our first guidance concentrates on JAX-WS Web Services over HTTP transport using the Apache SOAP stack : CXF

http://www.eclipse4sl.org/documentation/userdoc/html/webservice/cxf

Your feedback, recommendations and contributions are welcome.

The next guidance will focus on the interoperability between Silverlight and REST Web Services.

The eclipse4SL team announces the immediate availability of the version 1.0.0.M2 as scheduled in our development plan.

If you have installed the previous release, you need to uninstall it first: Open Eclipse Update manager: Help → “Software updates…”. Please follow the operation sequence indicated in below screen shot:

And then you can install the new version following the standard installation procedure.

Here are the new features added in this release:

1. XAML editor

All features of code context assist are completed. The project update is supported automatically when an element is defined in the default references.

1.1 Name conflict detection

When the same name is used by different elements, an error marker is created.

2 XAML Preview

We have overcome several limitations of Silverlight’s XAML loader by introducing a sophisticate pre-processing engine.

Style support

In the following example, the style definition is applied the TextBlock for the preview.

Support of User defined component

In the following example, the PersonView is a user defined Component, which contains fields “First name” and “Last name”. The Page.xaml embeds this component.

3. Resource management

3.1 Resource operation such as: add, rename and delete

All operations update automatically the project configuration files in msbuild format to keep the project in consistent state.

3.2 New JavaScript wizard

This wizard is used to created a JavaScript file.

3.3 New UI Page wizard

This wizard is used to created a XAML file without code-behind class.

3.4 New C# Class wizard

This wizard allows creating a C# class.

3.5 Resource view tools

An existing resource can be added in the project configuration via the wizard “Add existing item” or using “Import” wizard:

4. Build - Add verbose option in Preferences

Several users have met a problem of build: https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=2642492&forum_id=870800. This option helps the investigation.

When this option is checked, all building messages will be displayed in the “Console” view. By default, only the messages with errors/warnings are displayed.

5. Run

The preview release has bundled an old version of Chiron used as lightweight Web server. This version has a critical bug in Vista 64 bits. This release updates the latest version with the fix.

6. Complete online user documentation

A complete online documentation is available in two ways: Web and plugin. The documentation in plugin can be installed via Eclipse Update Manager:

7. Defects & Regression Testing

• ~200 Unit tests
• 180 integration tests (here is the QA report)
• ~30 Bug fixes

8. Developer Usability Testing

All examples provided in Silverlight SDK are tested: http://www.eclipse4sl.org/documentation/QA/1.0.0M2/XAMLEditor/5.1.2.html

9. Guidance on Silverlight applications consuming Java Web Services

We will publish a Guidance series about building Silverlight applications accessing Java Web Services using REST, SOAP and other standards. The guidance will be published on our official web site in the upcoming weeks.

10. Next Steps / Milestones

Stay tuned for future updates for the project. We are working actively to plan and scope the next milestones for the project. Do let us know if you have any feedback or feature requests:  http://www.eclipse4sl.org/community/

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone for their contributions on this project: bug reports, feature requests, suggestions, etc…

A presentation about eclipse4SL is scheduled at 15:00 Thursday, November 20. In this presentation, we will give an overview of this project and then focus on interoperability between Silverlight and Java Web service. Here is the agenda

1. What’s Silverlight?
2. Architecture of Eclipse SLDT
   • Project management
   • Tools of development
   • Build and Run
3. Roadmap
4. Demo on interoperability between Silverlight and Java Web service

Please feel free to come by and get in touch directly with us.

The past weeks, we have been busy to review our code, and we are glad to announce that the source code of eclipse4SL is now fully available on SourceForge. This page explains in detail how to access the SourceForge repository.

We plan to update the sourceforge repository once every 2 weeks. Due to performance issues, we will not use it for daily development. If you want to get daily updates, please contact us.

Here what you’ll find in the source codes of the M1 plugins :

• org.soyatec.csm - C Sharp Language Model
• org.soyatec.csdt - C# development toolkit
• org.soyatec.eclipse4sl.core - Core project
• org.soyatec.eclipse4sl.vex.silverlight - XAML editor
• org.soyatec.eclipse4sl.microsoft.msbuild - MSBuild model
• org.soyatec.ui.vex - Common XML GUI editor

Yves YANG

The third edition of Eclipse Now you can in France is scheduled at Oct 21th, 2008. This event contributes to strengthen the Eclipse community in France, and to create new initiatives between Eclipse users, contributors, add-in providers and service providers. We will demonstrate eclipse4SL in the session “Unified UI Programming”. Please feel free to come by and get in touch with the development team.

yves

Today, as scheduled, we published the Community Technical Preview release 1.0.0 M1. The Download page gives you detail instructions to install the plugins. Here are some tutorials to get started

The focus of this release is around architecture, infrastructure, resource management and basic tooling with Eclipse IDE. We are excited to show you our initial thinking of the project and some of the basic developer experience in RIA application development. We look forward to your feedback and feature requests.

We experience connectivity issues with SourceForge, which is an issue to get your feedback. We are working on it.

Update: Our forum and bug tracker are open. Please feel free to send us your feedback here.

yves yang

The entire team is very proud of launching the Open Source project: Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight.

The purpose of this project is the creation of open source tools integrated with the Eclipse development platform that enable Java developers to use the Eclipse platform to create applications that run on the Microsoft Silverlight runtime platform. Specifically, the project will be an Eclipse plug-in that works with the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) to provide both a Silverlight development environment and greater interoperability between Silverlight and Java, to facilitate the integration of Silverlight-based applications into Java-based web sites and services.

The project has been released as an open source project under EPL 1.0 license and submitted to the Eclipse Foundation: Eclipse Project Proposal.

We are excited to share with you our initial architectural thinking, design & eclipse developer experience in the form of a “Customer Technology Preview” version on the Documentation page. The Alpha version will be available October 14th, 2008 for immediate download from here. Please give it a try and give us your feedback on the bug tracker, and join the discussion on the user forum.