No Free Time

The Silverlight MediaElement control has an event CurrentStateChanged. If you’re building a Silverlight app that makes use of video this is crucial to being able to implement state logic. You may want some other UI elements to wait until a video is ready to play before they do their thing, for instance. The idea is that you listen for the event and when it’s fire you check the _mediaElement.CurrentState property to see what state it’s in. CurrentState will be a value like Buffering, Paused, Stopped, Playing etc.

Well annoyingly the CurrentState value isn’t always what it should be. I’ve worked with MediaElement a lot over the last few months and I’ve noticed that when a video finishes buffering its state could be any one of

• Stopped
• Paused
• Closed
• Opening
• Pondering
• Being coy

I guess that external factors like browser cache, video format and progressive downloading might play a part but, come on, seriously, the runtime really should be providing the solutions or workarounds to these problems so that I don’t have to. In a lot of cases there simply is no workaround. Very aggravating indeed.