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I have a Silverlight application developed with version 4.0. I tried running it with Silverlight 5 client and everything seems to be fine up to now.

But I am wondering; if my users installs Silverlight 5 for client, is it sure my application will still work well? Do I have to run all my Test Cases again?

If anyone notices something that has been broke between versions, please list it here! :)

Thanks

danbord
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  • All future versions should be backwards compatible. I highly doubt your application will stop working under Silverlight 5 when it was developed under Silverlight 4. – Lloyd Powell Dec 12 '11 at 12:50
  • I think I've just found one such backward compatibility issue. Here's my SO question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8974957/silverlight-5-oob-install-update-broken-when-using-anti-cache-trick – jv42 Jan 23 '12 at 16:46

2 Answers2

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There's little evidence around the internet at the moment, other than that published by Microsoft, which can be found here and here, which states, to summarise:

Several changes have been made to the Silverlight runtime and the Silverlight Tools between Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 5. For these changes, the following principles apply:

  • Most Silverlight 4 applications will work with Silverlight 5 without any changes.

  • When breaking changes are required, Silverlight will try to maintain support for the old behavior, as well as the new behavior, by using a quirks mode.

Nevertheless, some changes made to Silverlight components can potentially cause your older Silverlight-based applications to fail (compile time, XAML load time, or possibly design time) or to behave differently.

And,

There are no known breaking changes between Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 5 in the Silverlight core runtime. Applications that were originally compiled using Silverlight 4 tools, and that continue to target the Silverlight 4 runtime, should work without issues on a client that has the Silverlight 5 runtime.

If your project references any Silverlight SDK client assemblies [...] make sure that your project specifically references the Silverlight 5 version of the SDK client assemblies [...]. A project that targets Silverlight 5 cannot use the Silverlight 4 SDK assemblies.

There's more information in the links I provide, for instance, related to quirks mode, third party references, and behavioural changes.

Grant Thomas
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I have a project with a Silverlight 4 tool used to display a barchart etc. The Project upgrade to VS2013 automatically upgraded to Silverlight 5 and there were no warnings. I worked on other areas of the project and only by chance did I actually run it in debug mode to find that the display was broken somewhere inside the tool. I managed to scamper back to VS2012 and scavenge the changes I had made in the VS2013 version of the project.

Bob Clegg
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