Silverlight or WPF/E (WPF/Everywhere) was built to be a browser plugin. Small, secure and rich*. Why? I mean why stop at the browser? Why can't we deploy it in our own sandbox? Just imagine a brand new class of applications (or applets as I like to call them).
At this year's PDC, rumors were flying around about *good* Silverlight Hosting API possibilies in the next version. But even then, how would they work? Would they be cross platform?
One solution to enable this new class of applications is to host everything inside Trident (IE WebBrowser). This works if you want to run your app.on Windows only. To me, this particular class of apps would need to be cross platform to succeed. Even if you disagree and say you are fine with Windows only, you'll still be limited to the Trident's sandbox. Accessing the local system would be possible via window.extern but you'll need to solve the "same origin" (same domain) security restrictions if your xap is gonna be run from say (res:// or file://). And then on top of that, what are you gonna use to host the WebBrowser (Trident), WinForms? If so go straight up WinForms or WPF.
What else can we do? NPAPI to the rescue. Why not pretend to be a browser and load the Silverlight plugin just like a browser would. Gecko and WebKit based browsers do just that. They use the public Netscape Plugin API to load the plugins that the page needs, based on the MIME type specified in the embed. In our case it's the application/x-silverlight type. By going this route, we can control the sandbox, we can feed the functions to our applets to enable access to local system resources. We can control the same domain security restrictions. And finally, we can be cross platform and we don't need the hosting API even if it existed.
How cool would it be if I could include a .target file in my Silverlight project, and that .target would include all the steps needed to pack my xap into a single executable?
Welcome to project Fiji. An experimental work to do just that.
You can download the preview bits (fiji.exe) here http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/theonewith/fiji.zip.
To run it, simply pass in the name of your xap file in the command line: "fiji.exe C:\MySilverlightApplication.xap". (full path)
Would love to hear what you think.
Cheers
Azret