Question

I am embarking on development of a Silverlight based website. I am the lone developer and am doing it on my own (ie, not for any company).

Now I want to load a lot of textual content on the website along with animations and rich user interfaces that can be created using Silverlight. The text content may change from time to time and when that happens, I don’t want to do a lot of rework. So I m thinking to load the text from a Word/text file into controls and whenever new content arrives/existing content is modified, I just have to append it to the Word/text file.

This way the application itself remains untouched, only the file contents keep changing. Silverlight doesn’t support FlowDocument. RichTextBox doesnt have a Load or LoadFile property. So how do I go about this? Should I make use of Frame, Downloader and similar other controls as well? What do you suggest? What would be the best approach to this?

Answer 1

The RichTextBox does have a Xaml property so you could download Xaml files containing the restricted set of textual elements that RichTextBox supports. You could also create a Silverlight editor around which you could create and upload this Xaml text content.

However have you considered whether Silverlight is the right platform to deliver primarily textual content? HTML is pretty good at that and with frameworks such as JQuery you can create quite interactive experiences that work well across browsers.