Perfectly sensible approach, but that might cause some divergent coding differences between Mac and Windows. The Silverlight Sockets implementation uses different O/S features to implement it’s sockets support. On Apple Mac OS X, the namespace provides a managed implementation of the sockets interface based on Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX.” - MSDN “On Windows, the namespace provides a managed implementation of the Windows Sockets (Winsock) interface. This issue might be especially important since visual properties like background might be set by designers, and not developers.ĭifference #2: Different Stack That would cause a performance hit on a Mac, while leaving Windows machines completely unaffected. While on a Windows machine, the background would look perfectly solid. If we were to specify an background property with opacity and WindowLess=False, it would still be transparent on a mac. “if Silverlight is running on a Macintosh computer (where windowless mode is always active, regardless of theWindowless setting), the Background property value can specify an alpha value for the color.” – MSDN Which sounds pretty harmless, until we run into issues like this one: While on a Windows Machine, you can choose to have WindowLess=False, that state just isn’t available on a Mac. The mode is always windowless regardless of the Windowless setting.” - MSDN For Windows, the default is a windowed mode.įor Macintosh, there is no windowed mode. This article is strictly sourced from official Microsoft Silverlight documentation.Ĭategory: Plugin Browser Integration “ For Windows, you can display a browser-hosted Silverlight content area in either a windowed mode or a windowless mode. I will not be using my personal working experience with Silverlight, or my experience having worked at Microsoft, or any knowledge gained at Microsoft, or any external 3rd party evidence. I’ve compiled this list based on the following Bing search: site:/en-us/library Silverlight AND ('Mac' OR 'Macintosh' OR 'OS X') There’s a small, yet important, list of differences in how code executes on a Mac and on a Windows machine.Įvery factual statement about a Windows-to-Mac difference that is listed in this article will be quoted directly from MSDN. In that strict sense of the definition, Silverlight does have some places where it behaves differently for different operating systems.

Silverlight is in fact not fully cross platform.

“Of software, etc., designed to work on various operating systems” - Source.

“ capability of software to run identically on different platforms ” – Source.

Let’s look at some definitions for “ Cross Platform”: It’s quite easy to see why when first introducing Silverlight speakers don’t immediately go “Well, sort of Cross Platform” or reserve themselves by saying “mostly cross-platform that is.” It is often said in Silverlight books, articles and presentations world-wide that “Silverlight is Cross Platform”. The Misconception – Silverlight is 100% Cross PlatformĬonfused? Perplexed? Bewildered? Get a hold of yourself and be a man. Silverlight differs from WinForms & WPF in that it runs primarily in the browser and works on multiple operating systems.įrom the history of web development (especially from Javascript) we all recognize the importance of writing code that runs on multiple browsers and operating systems. Net UI frameworks like WPF & WinForms were mostly limited to running exclusively on Windows machines. In this article I’d like to go over some well-known Silverlight divergent behaviours between Windows and Mac. Silverlight Isn’t Fully Cross-Platform Silverlight Isn’t Fully Cross-Platform Justin

Silverlight for safari on mac