Making Silverlight Applications Available Offline

Ok, so I am a huge fan of the Silverlight development environment, C# and XAML represent one of the best UI design paradigms in computing today. Needless to say, I cannot thank the Moonlight project enough for bringing Silverlight support to Linux. The problem is, Microsoft either want’s me to develop a desktop application or a web-based application…. And only one of those is cross platform. Needless to say, if I restrict my WPF application to exclusively Silverlight-available libraries, I can get it to run on Linux. This is far from seamless, but in a pinch, it can be an option.

However, a far better solution would be to load Silverlight in the browser, while offline. (Taking advantage of the Silverlight plugin and its packaging). Utilizing Google Gears, I was able to serve up the compiled .xap file and run the Silverlight app in Firefox without a connection to the server hosting it. I haven’t had a chance to test how IsolatedStorage behaves under these conditions, or how Moonlight handles it (couldn’t get the latest 2.0 to build), but here is the VS2008 solution I used to get everything working.

Offline Silverlight Via Gears Demo