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Source: Simple-Talk

Silverlight can now be used to write a complete business application that can be run outside the browser. Such an application will probably need to to automatically check, and react to, changes to the network status, as well as automatically download and install updates from the server. It will need to be easily installed from the browser. Richard Costall explains how, with a complete example.

This article is Part 5 of the series on Microsoft Silverlight Exam:

• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 1)
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 2)
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 3) 
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 4)
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 5)
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 6)
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 7)

Time flies when you’re having fun and meanwhile learning something. That certainly goes for me while I create these articles; I hope it’s the same for you when you read them. If you kept track, we have now arrived at part 5 already, so we are slowly approaching the end of the series. However, this very part is shaping up to be a large one, as you can see. It also covers a lot of interesting material in Silverlight, as we’ll soon see!

Whereas all previous parts looked at features of Silverlight itself, this part is focusing on the things that happen around Silverlight so to say.

Matt Duffield has posted about his experince in writing Silverlight applications working both in and out of the browser.

Source: Matt Duffield's Blog

Silverlight is quite powerful and gives you a lot of flexibility. You can have your application run in the browser our you can opt for a more Windows like experience and run your application Out of the Browser. One of the frustrations that I have encountered in the past, is trying to write my code so that it supports both.

Damian Schenkelman has an example on how to load modules that were packaged for remote module loading in a Silverlight OOB app.

Source: Damian Schenkelman's Blog

I created this sample a couple of months ago, and I thought might be useful for others. Here you can download the sample I put together using the Modularity QS from Prism 4. You can also download the necessary files separately (OOBModuleManager.cs and CachingXapModuleTypeLoader.cs)

Watch a recording of Gill Cleeren's webinar 'Build a Silverlight 4 Application end-to-end' delivered on December 15th, 2010.

Download the slides used during the webinar | Download the demos | Download the Q&A document

Gill covered the following topics:

1. SketchFlow
2. WCF RIA Services
3. Data binding & DataGrid
4. MVVM
5. MEF
6. Commanding & behaviors
7. Messaging, navigation & dialogs
8. Custom controls & third party controls
9. OOB
10. Printing

Since Data binding and MEF were already covered in previous webinars (recording of webinar on Data Binding, recording of webinar on MEF), these topics were reviewed only briefly in this webinar.

Become a SilverlightShow Member to receive all webinar news and updates by email.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

This is the first in a 3-part series of articles about caching & Silverlight.

• Part 1: The client: XAP & Assembly Caching
• Part 2: The Silverlight application: Isolated Storage 
• Part 3: The server: caching your result sets & writing a Silverlight cache provider 

You can download the source code here.

A lot can be written about this subject, and because of that, quite a few misunderstandings about Silverlight and caching exist.

Let’s start with a general definition of caching: this is what Wikipedia has to say about this technique:

In computer science, a cache is a component that improves performance by transparently storing data such that future requests for that data can be served faster.

Source: C#er : Image

While there is no easy solution to truly embed HTML inside of the Silverlight rendering engine, it is possible to render the HTML using the browser into a DIV element that is overlaid on your Silverlight application. In fact, because the rendering engine is powerful enough to provide you with all of the sizing events and triggers you need, you can create a very convincing experience displaying HTML in your application - even from the browser.

To illustrate this in action, we'll build a sort of "Silverlight browser" that allows you to navigate to any web page. In reality, we'll load the URL into an IFRAME that lives inside a DIV. What will be important to note is that the DIV automatically moves and resizes when you resize the application, as if it were a part the application itself!

Source: JohnPapa.net

The session covered all of the fundamentals of out of browser, went into several examples, and showed a few tips and tricks. I packaged up the some of the more popular demos and the slide deck and you can download them all right here. The music player demo is a port from the presentation Joe Stegman did at the last PDC and the Puzzle is a port from the one Scott Gu did at the last PDC. The eBay Simple Lister app is live and available (no source included as its eBay’s property).