Friday, March 07, 2008

Silverlight 2 SDK, Mac OS X and Mono

John Lam has posted two introductory articles [1],[2] that use the Dynamic Silverlight SDK . It came as no surprise that only Microsoft operating systems are officially supported for the SDK. So after downloading and installing it onto a VMWare image running one of the supported operating systems, I decided to try installing it on my Macbook Pro. I copied the SDK directory structure across, installed the Mono 1.2.6 for OSX, and John's demos. Then in a terminal session, started chirod, the SDK local web server in the flickr_start root directory.

mono ~/Silverlight/v2.0/Tools/Chiron/Chiron.exe /b

and was presented with the following:

Microsoft(R) Silverlight(TM) Development Utility. Version 1.0.0.0
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Chiron serving '/Users/mark/swdev/demos/flickr_start' as http://localhost:2060/
mono(2077,0xa000d000) malloc: *** Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x14f5b4; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug
23:44:00 200 2,340 /index.html
23:44:00 200 2,397 /assets/stylesheets/error.css
23:44:01 200 552,610 /app.xap


The error didn't affect the functionality of the Silverlight demo.



I then tried the flickr_end demo and discovered what error messages look like under the SDK environment.



This error also occurs under Windows so it would appear that John is using a newer version of Silverlight 2 and/or IronPython that handles the line of python code.

Anyway it looks like I will be able to use my Mac environment for Dynamic Silverlight development.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You can get the newest bits from http://dynamicsilverlight.net/get/. The Silverlight SDK has slightly older bits, but it still useful for people getting started.

If John's demos don't work on that then I'll make sure to post an update of the source so it does work. =)

Let me know if you have any suggestions on the error handling.

Making things work on the Mac is a huge deal for us; I have a Mac and want to do Silverlight development on it as well ... so we'll make sure Chiron always works with Mono. =)

~Jimmy

Sean Clark Hess said...

Tutorial - Develop Silverlight with Ruby on Mac OS X or Linux with the DLR SDK and a Text Editor (TextMate)

[...] I really wanted to use Textmate to develop Silverlight applications, and avoid dropping to windows. At first, it didn't seem possible, but eventually I ran into enough blog posts to figure it out. None of these had all the instructions in one place, so I figured I'd add the basic steps and comment on each of the posts I used. [...]