Silverlight 3 Beta Offline or Out of Browser applications

Now Microsoft added support for Silverlight applications to run out of browser.Earlier it was accomplished by a tool called Desklighter released by Identitymine.

Details on how to make a Silverlight 3 application offline is available here by Pete Brown.

Portability of offline Silverlight applications.

This post describes how can we make the Silverlight applications portable.ie how to copy offline Silverlight application from one system to another.

Normally when we select the Install button on the silverlight context menu the system copies the required files (mainly .xap)into a cache folder locatable at

[Drive]:\Users\[username]\AppData\LocalLow\Microsoft\Silverlight\Offline

The folder name will be localhost.<serial no of offline app in the system> provided the Silverlight application which you saved is running in the localhost.

For eg if you are creating your first offline application the folder name will be localhost.0.

Once you locate this offline folder you can just copy that folder to the new machine.To run the application you need to copy the Shortcut file also which was created in the desktop or in the start menu.In case you don’t have the short cut file you may run by giving the following command in console.

[Install drive]:\Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40307.0\sllauncher.exe" localhost.0

To run another offline application just change the number (here 0) at the end.

NB: This post is written based on Silverlight 3 Beta.Things may change in actual release.

Desklighter - The Silverlight to exe converter

Lastweek Identitymine released its new product called Desklighter.It's a tool to convert silverlight application / site to a standalone windows exe application.ie A silverlight to exe converter.One can use this it they are in a situation which demands a standalone silverlight application.

Application areas

1. Presentations :
   Since Silverlight is a rich presentation technology one can easily create presentations and publish in their sites.But currently that cannot be viewed without an internet connection.But Desklighter allows you to store Silverlight presentations in your hard disk and view it without internet connection.Very much useful in marketing,education..
   
2. Games :
   Silverlight games can be played offline.(Unless they are networked to store scores or multiuser)
3. Offline Silverlight browsing :
   Developers can create entire sites using Silverlight and if they handle the online and offline conditions it can be converted using Desklighter to use it as standalone application.The network operations ie data loading and saving should be programmed to be done whenever the net connection is available.
   

Currently desklighter is in identitymine blendables labs as a free download.More technical details can be found here.The future releases may extend support on Linux and Mac desktop machines where the current version supports only windows desktop.