Microsoft Developer User Research has upcoming opportunities for Rich Internet Application developers (Silverlight, Air etc) with experience using Silverlight and C# or VB.

The researchers would like to understand different scenarios, workflows etc.  that RIA developers are working on.  The researchers are particularly interested in developers who are currently taking their applications OOB (out of browser) or considering it.

The feedback received will be used to build features to support those scenarios in the next version of Silverlight.

The study will be conducted at your convenience between 6/3-6/24 and will take two hours.

Interested in providing feedback for this study? Email devur@microsoft.com with SV in the subject line. All participants will receive a gratuity item from a selection of current Microsoft products.

Thank you for your consideration, your support is greatly appreciated!

By default, when debugging, Silverlight will launch your application in the browser. However, if you application is configured to run in Out of Browser (OOB) mode and is installed on the box you can configure debugging to occur directly in the OOB application window rather than the browser.

To accomplish this follow these steps:

   1. Verify your application is installed for OOB use on the box you are debugging from.

   2. Open up your application in Visual Studio, right click on Silverlight application in the solution explorer and choose “Properties”.

   3. Click on the Debug tab and then click on the “Out-of-browser application” radio button.

   4. Finally, right click on your Silverlight application again in the solution explorer and choose “Set as Startup Project”.

Hit F5 and you will be good to go:

Thank you,

–Mike

By default Silverlight applications are restricted to run inside your browser. However, you can configure your application to allow for out of browser (OOB) use.

OOB Advantages include:

   1. Users can run your application when they are offline (assuming networking is not a requirement for your application).

   2. Application can be run in Elevated Trust mode. See this blog for more info.

OOB Disadvantages include:

   1. Cannot communicated with the browsers DOM since Silverlight is run in its own window hosted from the SLLauncher.exe process.

Step #1: Configuring your application for OOB.

First, to configure your application to enable OOB use open up your Silverlight project in Visual Studio. In the solution explorer, right click on your Silverlight application and select Properties. From the properties window select the Silverlight tab and click the checkbox to enable running OOB as seen in the screenshot below.

Next, click on the “Out-Of-Browser Settings…” button. This will bring up a dialog where you can further configure your experiencing including the windows title, windows dimensions, icons you want to use, etc. as seen in the screenshot below.

Step #2: Installing

Now that OOB is enabled in your application it’s up to your users to actually take the actions to install it for OOB use. There are two possible ways this can happen.

The first option is they can right click on your Silverlight application and from the context menu choose the install link as seen below.

Obviously this isn’t a very discoverable way for users to discover this feature. The second option is to call Application.Current.Install() in response to a user driven event such as a button click. In the button click event below I make an attempt to install the application OOB.

private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 

{ 

    try 

    { 

        Application.Current.Install(); 

    } 

    catch (InvalidOperationException opex) 

    { 

        MessageBox.Show("Application is already installed"); 

    } 

    catch (Exception ex) 

    { 

        MessageBox.Show("Application could not be installed" + Environment.NewLine +ex.Message); 

    } 

}

Note that you can check to see if your application is already running in OOB mode by calling Application.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser. You can also check to see if it’s already installed by checking if Application.Current.InstallState == InstallState.Installed.

Once a user chooses to install OOB they will see the following prompt:

From this prompt users can choose whether to put the shortcut on the start menu and/or the desktop. Once installed your application will automatically launch in its own window. It can be re-launched at any time by clicking on the shortcut you installed to the desktop/start menu.

Step #3: Uninstalling

There are two ways to get your application uninstalled.

   1. Right click and choose “Remove this application…”

   2. Uninstall it from the Add/Remove programs in the control panel of Windows.

[silverlight: Tip4OutOfBrowser.xap]

Thank you,

–Mike