Silverlight 3 Out of Browser Experience (Wow Starts Now)

RizwanSharp — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 04:26:45 GMT

The day I read about what’s new in Silverlight 3 on Tim’s Blog, I got really amazed to know that what amazing features this new version has to offer Sigh…

Among all the cool features, Silverlight 3 provides developers the ability to enable offline application execution. In other words, a developer can provide a few settings in Application Manifest which will make an application be able to save on user’s computer.

So lets see how it works.

Create a Silverlight 3 Application in Visual Studio and open the manifest file “AppManifest.xml” which can be found under Properties folder in Solution explorer.

Contents of the file look like this:

<Deployment xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007/deployment"
        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
    <Deployment.Parts>
    </Deployment.Parts>

</Deployment>

Ok Simply uncomment the

<Deployment.ApplicationIdentity>

……………
</Deployment.ApplicationIdentity>
Provide application name in ShortName attribute. Title of application host when this application is running out of the browser. Provide Description in <ApplicationIdentity.Blurb>Description of your Silverlight application</ApplicationIdentity.Blurb>

Whoops! Application is ready for out of browser execution.

Simply run the application:

In the context menu, you have the “Install” option enabled now. Let’s click the install and see what happens?

Select the Shortcuts locations and Click “OK”. Application is now installed on local machine and can be executed by clicking the created shortcuts.

You can optionally use Detach() method of Application class under user click to popup the install screen if application not currently installed.

Application.Current.Detach()

You can check if application is running out of the browser by checking value RunningOffline property of Application class.

bool offline = Application.Current.RunningOffline;

You can also provide a set of icons for your application using:

<ApplicationIdentity.Icons>
            <Icon Size="16x16">AppIcon16.png</Icon>
            <Icon Size="32x32">AppIcon32.png</Icon>
            <Icon Size="64x64">AppIcon64.png</Icon>
            <Icon Size="128x128">AppIcon128.png</Icon>
</ApplicationIdentity.Icons>

But make sure to add these images to your project with Build action set to “Content”.

That was it :) and here is the Source Code of Sample Application.

Happy Silverlighting :D.

Rizwan a.k.a RizwanSharp

Silverlight 3 Has Arrived...

RizwanSharp — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:47:21 GMT

Just a quick post to announce that Silverlight 3 Beta has arrived. Third version of Silverlight seems very much promising. A lot of new features has been added to this release even then plugin size is almost 30-40 KB smaller than it was for Silverlight 2. Microsoft has also released new versions of Tools for Visual Studio and Expression Blend. I could not stop myself from downloading the tools right away and having some hand ons with it. You can have a look on complete set of changes and enhancements over here:

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx#whatsnew

Download the tools from here:

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx

I'll be posting more and more about Silverlight 3 in coming weeks cuz I'm really excited about this release

Stay Tuned!

Best Regards,

Rizwan