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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