replicator.org ... continuous garbage collection

Silverlight, a platform to bring serious development to the browser. That is what I am thinking about it. I jumped into it. A fresh start. Silverlight contains a simple but powerful rendering engine and a set of media components. What are missing are user interface widgets, automatic layout management and everything else that makes it useful for building applications.

When compared with WPF, Silverlight’s dependency property system seems to be very limited, even so that adding properties is not supported. Yes, it is in its early alpha stages, but because the property system does not use generics like it could be, I tried to build my own. I’ve put down all these puristic attempts and started with the obvious: a common base class named Part that stores the properties. For accessing them, I found a very neat syntax pattern, which I call “properties first”:

For example, to set a property:

var myPart = new Part();
Size[myPart] = new Size(100.0, 100.0);

to retrieve a property:

var size = Size[myPart];

Short, simple, and concise. You don’t need to build property wrappers and properties may be dynamically attached or bound to a specific base type. Of course this system supports change propagation and simple invalidation logic. Probably a base for more to come …

visions first!!

yours
armin