Silverlight out-of-browser support: What kind of apps can you build?

This is first in my series of technical drilldown posts on the new offline and out of browser support in Silverlight 3.

It is something of a tradition in Microsoft to list out scenarios when a new feature set is being conceived. This practice is by no means unique to this company. I feel that doing so establishes a common baseline and taxonomy which immensely helps as the concept matures and gains complexity. Typically these scenarios are fleshed out in functional specifications.

In this post, I summarize the flavors of apps and scenarios that are enabled by the new offline and out of browser support in Silverlight 3. Most of these are self-explanatory and so using another Microsoft tradition, I will stick to concise bullet points rather than prose. A list similar to the one below in fact was used by our crew when we started our planning for this feature set a few months ago:

Connectedness

Fully disconnected app

• App has no networking needs
• Reliance on Silverlight just as an installation vehicle for the app
• We don’t expect this will be very common

Occasionally connected app

• App is resilient to network outage
• Conditionally persists data into iso store or cloud based on network availability
• This is the sweet spot for our feature offerings and where most of our attention goes

Connected app

• App uses the offline feature set only for the sticky desktop presence
• We don’t expect this will be very common

User experience

App behaves exactly the same in browser and out

• App author wants to deliver the same experience in either case
• “Try before you buy”, “Get more features upon install” and other such progressively enhanced SKU situations
• Our data suggests consumers find comfort in apps that – in broad brushes – seem similar OOB as when they did in-browser

App shows different UI in-browser and out-of-browser

• App author wants to exploit the real estate available in standalone window
• Browser page could have limited functionality which lights up only upon detach
• Browser page shows only the “Install” badge and the “real” UI only shows up when launched out of browser

Approach

Porting an existing Silverlight 2 app to run offline/out-of-browser

• Even though the feature is a new addition to SL3, some SL2 apps can benefit from it
• Requires no changes to code and no rebuilds
• Can be done as a post-production step by modifying the manifest and optionally adding icons into the XAP
• Build disconnected and connected apps, but not occasionally connected

Building a new offline/out-of-browser app

• Our mainline scenario
• Leverage everything the offline/out-of-browser feature set and the rest of Silverlight has to offer
• Build disconnected, connected and occasionally connected apps

In the next post, we will look at the pillars of this feature, starting with the install (a.k.a detach) operation.

Related posts:

• Introducing Offline and Out of Browser support in Silverlight

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