Silverlight 1.1 updates on Vista Gadgets

In my previous post I wrote about "Transparent Silverlight Sidebar Gadgets"!

Now a reader sent me a comment about the new Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh, and the gadget not working there.

So I updated the example and replaced the Silverlight.js files with the newester version!

Here is the updated version of what you need to do to create a transparent sidebar gadget with Silverlight in it:

Add the JavaScript call createSilverlight(); to your gadget's HTML page (for all SL gadgets)
Add the special sidebar's "g:background" layer and set the background-image to a transparent PNG file
<g:background src="bg.png" mce_src="bg.png" id="Bg" style="position:absolute;width:130px;height:130px;z-index:-1"/>
The next thing is, you need to remove the Background attribute of the XAML's root canvas
Set two properties of the Silverlight Control:

function createSilverlight()
{
    Silverlight.createObjectEx({
       ...
        properties: { ...
                isWindowless: "true",
                background:'#00000000'

       }

}

This way the Silverlight control will have no window (allowing it to be dragged around) and will have a transparent background (letting the desktop shine through)

The updated version of the Silverlight Gadget is attached to this posting!

Comments

Anonymous
August 08, 2007
PingBack from http://blogs.msdn.com/knom/archive/2007/06/06/my-first-silverlight-sidebar-gadget.aspx
Anonymous
August 13, 2007
The anti aliasing issue really does spoil this. Is there a way round it? Can we switch off anti-aliasing for the contents of a canvas? I noticed textblocks do not display either. Still sweet tho! M
Anonymous
September 29, 2007
Yep, there is a way to remove aa-related pink borders. Just rewrite the host div with this style: <div id="SilverlightControlHost" class="silverlightHost" style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=100);"> This removes semi-transparent borders and so on, but what I really want - SL transparent figures and desktop shining through them - seems impossible ( Any ideas?