Browser Information In Silverlight

In this post I will show you how to get the browser information.To get the browser information the namespace used for this is System.Windows.Browser. The BrowserInformation object contains properties such as the name, product name, product version , browser version etc. Let us start with the example which will use to get this information and display on the screen which I will share with you at the end of the post I will use two screen shot one for the Internet explorer and the second one for the Fire Fox.

For this Example I have create one class with the name BrowserInfo  which has the properties like BrowserName , BrowerVersion, Platform, ProductName, UserAgent of type string , IsCookiesEnabled of type Boolean to indicate whether Cookies are enabled or not , BrowserMinorVersion and BrowserMajorVersion are of type int.You can see the default constructor of the BrowserInfo class which is used to initialize all the properties of the class.

public BrowserInfo()
        {
            BrowserName = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.Name;
            BrowserVersion = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.BrowserVersion.ToString();
            BrowserMajorVersion = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.BrowserVersion.Major;
            BrowserMinorVersion = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.BrowserVersion.Minor;
            IsCookiesEnabled = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.CookiesEnabled;
            Platform = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.Platform;
            ProductName = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.ProductName;
            ProductVersion = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.ProductVersion;
            UserAgent = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation.UserAgent;            
        }

List 1

In the code you can see that BrowserName property is assigned the value of the Name in the BrowserInformation object which is the static member of the HtmlPage static class which is reside in the System.Windows.Browser namespace. The Name property of the BrowserInformation return the version of the browser technology that the current browser is based on.The browser technology name is typically different from the browser product name. CookiesEnabled property of BrowserInformation object indicate whether the browser supports cookies or not. The ProductName property of the BrowserInformation object get the product name of the browser.The browser product name is the familiar name of the browser, such as "FireFox".

You can see the output of the two different browser One for the internet explorer and second one is by using the Fire fox you can see the different properties of the two browsers.

Fire Fox

Internet Explorer

You can also see the Major and Minor version of the browser as shown in the screen shots. The UserAgent property will Gets the user agent string of the browser.The Platform property will return name of the operating system that the browser is running on. You can use these properties to developer application like the Google analysis or you can use them to show the trend of your site the user operation system the browser name etc.

All and any comments / bugs / suggestions are welcomed!

Reading And Writing Isolated Storage In Silverlight

In this post I will show you how you can create file on the Isolated Storage and also write on that file and also how can you check the size of the Isolated storage.Isolated storage is a mechanism that allows you to preserve data across browser sessions on a user’s machine. This storage area is tied to an individual user and helps you overcome the 4 KB limitation of a cookie. Unlike a cookie, isolated storage lies outside of the browser cache.
The code which is used to write in the Isolated Storage is listed in List 1.The class used for the Isolated Storage is IsolatedStorageFile which represents an isolated storage area containing files and directories. IsolatedStorageFile class has static method with the name GetUserStoreForApplication which is used to obtains user-scoped isolated storage corresponding to the calling code's application identity. After retrieving the user isolated storage object next step is to create the stream object which is used to write the contains.

using (IsolatedStorageFile isolatedStoragFile = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication())
            {
                using (IsolatedStorageFileStream stream = new IsolatedStorageFileStream("MyFileName.txt", FileMode.Append, isolatedStoragFile))
                {
                    using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(stream))
                    {
                        writer.Write("Message Date And Time: " + DateTime.Now.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss") +" -> "+ txtTextToWrite.Text + "\r");
                    }
                    stream.Close();
                }
            }

List 1

IsolatedStorageFileStream is the class which Exposes a file within isolated storage.IsolatedStorageFileStream is used to read, write and create files in isolated storage. So if you want to read , write or create new file in the Isolated Storage area you need the object of the IsolatedStorageFileStream. I have passed the file name which in this case is .txt extension the, second parameter is the FileMode enumeration which has one of the values as listed in the table given below.The last parameter to the IsolatedStorageFileStream constructor is the IsolatedStorageFile object which is created before.

FileMode
Description

CreateNew
Attempts to create a new file If a file of the same name exists, an IsolatedStorageException will be thrown. If there isn’t a preexisting file with the same name, a new, empty file will be created. 
Create
A brute-force approach to creating a new file If a file of the same name exists, it’ll be overwritten. Either way, a new, empty file with the specified name will be created.
Open
Attempts to open a file with the given name If the file exists, the IsolatedStorageFileStream will have access to the file. If the file doesn’t exist, an IsolatedStorageException will be thrown.
OpenOrCreate
Opens a file if it exists. If the file doesn’t exist, a new one will be created with the given name.
Truncate
Open an existing file and removes all its contents. This FileMode doesn’t allow read operations.
Append
Opens an existing file and prepares to add content onto the end

Table 1

After the creation of the IsolatedStorageFileStream object next is to use the StreamWriter class which take the IsolatedStorageFileStream object in the constructor and use the StreamWriter object to write the text or binary to the file.  The Image 1 show the layout of the example which I have used for the Isolated Storage. Here you can see that I have used two text boxes one for the input which user entered and second one is to read from the Isolated storage area which is shown in the Image 2.

Image 1

Image 2

The IsolatedStorageFile class has some useful properties which can be use to check the available free space (Gets a value that represents the amount of free space available for isolated storage.the value is in bytes), used space (Gets a value that represents the amount of the space used for isolated storage. the value is  in  bytes)and total allocated space to the current user.If you look at the example you can see that I have also print out the available free space and used space as well to show you how much space is available and how much is used.You can download the source code from here.

All and any comments / bugs / suggestions are welcomed!