Pro Silverlight 4 in C#

Chapter 21. Out-of-Browser Applications

As you already know, the code for every Silverlight application is contained in a XAP file. The Silverlight browser plug-in downloads this file from the web server and executes it on the client. After this point, there's no requirement for the web server to get involved again—all the code runs on the local computer.

This design raises an interesting possibility. Although Silverlight applications depend on the Silverlight browser plug-in, there's no technical reason that they need to be embedded in a live web page. In fact, as long as there's a reliable way to run the Silverlight plug-in outside of a browser, it's also possible to run a Silverlight application on its own.

This is the essential idea behind Silverlight ...