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When authoring a Silverlight LOB application (think Outlook) with Child windows, the child windows are are mere 'fakes'. They don't get their own taskbar item, hence CTRL-TAB does not work, only modal display possible etc...

Compare that to a typical LOB application like Outlook where you can open a contact besides a message and so forth. For a power-user, the Silverlight equivalent lacks in usability.

Am I the only one bugged by this? :) How do you guys solve this?

Tom Deleu
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  • just curious - is this in-browser or out-of-browser? I don't know if the OOB story is any better, just curious. – James Manning Nov 24 '10 at 02:00
  • The OOB scenario is just the same. Only difference is that you don't have the browser chrome anymore. Otherwise, child windows behave just the same. Contained within your app... – Tom Deleu Nov 24 '10 at 07:38

1 Answers1

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There's no getting around the fact that windows in Silverlight are not full-blown Windows. There are third-party window controls (i.e. Telerik) that can behave like real windows, with resize, maximize, drag, and non-modal functionality.

You could set up your application to "fake" Alt-Tab with a different hotkey combination of your choice. This would work only while the parent Silverlight app has focus.

Dave Swersky
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  • Jup, this is indeed the 'obvious' approach. However, something feels wrong about it, dunno. Is we have to fake a windowing system to bring some LOB usability (but certainly not all), it seems wrong (I guess it would confuse the user more than it does any good), and perhaps we'd better think of an other way of presenting the information while maintaining the usability. Certainly no one-answer-for-all question, but i'm interested to different other opinions. – Tom Deleu Nov 23 '10 at 14:53