Visual Studio / YUI combination

May 5, 2007

Is there a way to have web apps built with Visual Studio automatically use the YUI javascript toolkit controls instead of or in addition to MS tools?  If not, perhaps MS would be kind enough to offer that option in a future version, or perhaps even bundle them directly.  Given than the YUI controls are BSD licensed, there’s no legal or moral reason to not do that.  From what I’ve seen the cross-platformness of MS’s VS controls for web apps are pretty good already, but I’ve not tested them on the more fringe browsers.  It’s not that I necessarily expect them to work on all browsers, but I know that the YUI stuff does a good job at the ‘graceful degradation’ which helps cross-platform efforts.

I tried the Silverlight 1.1 alpha plugin on my XP box, but it didn’t work with FireFox 2.0.  I’m not sure if it’s supposed to or not.  I was reading that the Silverlight technology was supposed to be cross-platform, but all that meant was it’d work on a Mac, not the broader Unix market in general.  IIRC, the mono project promised Silverlight compatibility by the end of 2007, but I’m a bit skeptical of that.

Posted in Development, Microsoft, Software, Web, Yahoo, opensource