Silverlight™ 3 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 12. Silverlight, the Browser, and the Server

Prepare yourself for a fun ride through the rapids. This chapter will gear you up with an understanding of where Silverlight sits in relation to the browser and the server, two foundational relationships that you need to know inside and out. First, you'll take a brief tour of the knobs that Silverlight offers to configure the run time and your applications and then go on to how to deal with various non-executing resources. After that, you dig deep into Silverlight's relationship with the browser, which, as you'll see, is quite extensive and powerful thanks to the HTML bridge. Finally, you'll wrap up with a look at Silverlight's relationship with the server, with particular focus on the facilities that ASP.NET brings to the table to make your life easier.

Silverlight All by Its Lonesome

It is strange to think about it this way, but Silverlight is in itself an entire development and runtime platform for applications. Microsoft has created a specialized managed run time, set of libraries, and a common translation layer so that it can run on multiple operating systems, much like Java. Some have called Silverlight just a player or just another applet or plug-in, and it is those, but it is selling Silverlight short to leave it at that.

It's important to draw this out because you really need to think of it as a full-fledged run time apart from the browser, the server, and the operating system. It is its own ecosystem, a mini-universe for ...