Where does Off-Browser Silverlight Run?
Posted: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 8:45 AM
by
bruce
Filed under: Home, Newsletter, Silverlight, MIX09
Off-browser Silverlight is pretty cool. And one of the first questions that got raised is ‘where is it running’. Obviously, it’s not running within the browser. I mean, duh. But if not there, then where?
I got the first inkling of an answer listening to Mike Harsh’s presentation on off-browser Silverlight at MIX ‘09 (slides, demos and video can be found on his blog). Actually, it wasn’t his presentation, per se, but his answering of questions afterwards. I actually give Mike props for doing this presentation. Off-browser Silverlight is very easy to configure and use. It’s difficult to find 60 minutes worth of content when the user experience is ‘right-click to install…right-click again to uninstall’ and the developer experience is ‘check a box in the property sheet’. But from his easy handling of the questions afterwards, it’s pretty obvious that he knows the topic well.
One of the post presentation questions Mike was asked was related to the ‘how’ of off-browser Silverlight. Mike intimated that, basically, the Browser control was used. In other words, when installed on a client’s machine, launching the Silverlight application actually launches an application which hosts the Browser control. The Browser control then hosts the Silverlight application.
As it turns out, this is “basically” true. For the Windows platform, it’s precisely true. From Chris Hayak, the application which is launched is called SLLauncher.exe. This is also the application to which you will attach if you want to debug Silverlight apps in off-browser mode. For the Mac platform, the SLLauncher application runs webkit, which in turn hosts the Silverlight application.
The one downside of this approach is that, at least during the beta, there is no way to distinguish between multiple, simultaneous off-browser Silverlight apps. They all appear in the process list as ‘sllauncher.exe’. Hopefully this will change before SL3 goes gold.
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