Windows 7 developers have tons of cool stuff at their (our) fingertips. There's taskbar integration, the new sensors and location platform, access to devices, and more. Silverlight developers, on the other hand, have so far not been able to get to all of that. Well, now you can! The Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight leverages the ability of Silverlight to do COM integration, and puts COM Automation around a collection of Windows 7 functionality so that Silverlight developers can use it. How cool is that?
Because it's
on the Code Gallery, you know it's from Microsoft. The first release, Dec 2nd, covers:
- Windows Sensor API - Integrate sensors: Accelerometers, Light sensors, compasses, gyroscopes etc.
- Microsoft Speech API - Text to Speech (Speech Synthesis) and Speech to Text (Speech Recognition)
- Windows Portable Devices API - Enumerate and access content from connected portable devices (cameras, phones, music players, scanners etc.)
- Windows 7 Taskbar Integration - Jump lists, overlay icons, overlay progress display, Thumbnail toolbars etc.
- Webcam Local Encoding and Window Capture - Encode webcam capture into mp4 (H.264/AAC-LC) media - Capture user interface interaction as video
- Window Message Interception - Intercept and act on Window messages sent to the Silverlight OOB host window
This certainly gives Silverlight developers some interesting options! There are some samples that come with the library to show you what you can do, too. You might also be interested in Maor David's blog entry about the library.
