When I upgraded to Orcas B2, all of my .js code showed up in a lovely shade of black. For me, fixing this was as simple as doing a full “Repair” on my Visual Studio install, but I did find a note to another, more detailed method that solved the same problem. If the repair doesn’t work, perhaps try the second method. Intellisense is back — now how about some rudimentary code folding, please? Back to UltraEdit for JavaScript hacking, I guess.

I’ve been digging in to Silverlight 1.1 lately, and I came across an issue where I was unable to load XML from a local (i.e. a “file:///”) URL. (I’m still unable to, by the way — trying to figure out if it’s a sandbox limitation or an incorrectly formed URL). Regardless, I was a little miffed that my Silverlight 1.0 apps automatically launched in a dynamic VS web server, and my Silverlight 1.1 apps did not. I found a great post by Peter Kellner that explains exactly how to set this up.

For my needs, I created an “Empty Web Site” instead of an ASP.NET site. After following the instructions on Peter’s page, be sure to configure your new website as the startup project in VS. Now, when I need to load XML content, I use the code from the Manipulate XML Data in Silverlight HowTo, except that when I determine the correct URL, I add in the port from the DocumentUri:

private string GetUrl()
{
    string path = HtmlPage.DocumentUri.AbsolutePath;
    int lastSlash = path.LastIndexOf( "/" );
    path = path.Substring( 0, lastSlash + 1 );
    string port = ":" + HtmlPage.DocumentUri.Port;

    return "http://" + HtmlPage.DocumentUri.Host + port +
        path + "path/to/file.xml";
}

Even if you’re not running your deployment web server on a non-standard port, the port will resolve to “:80″, which is completely legal.

Tim Sneath has a post on 15 new things in .NET 3.5, most notable (to me, at least) being some long-awaited animation fixes, XLINQ support (finally!) and support for XBAPs in Firefox.

Been kinda quiet here on the posting front as I rapidly dive into Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 simultaneously, so expect some impressions there soon…