The application has to be running in elevated trust which is something that in browser applications can do in Silverlight 5.

The application has to be running in a version of Internet Explorer (i.e.

As you might imagine, this gets just a little bit complex because you have a situation that looks like this Īnd the specific circumstances that make this work are In Silverlight 5, the WebBrowser control can now also be used for Silverlight apps that run in the browser in specific circumstances. They just want to provide an “in browser” app and so Silverlight 5 adds another tweak to this idea of mixing HTML/Silverlight. Not every user wants to “install” something to the local machine and the developer doesn’t want to present the user with that “installation” dialog that you get with an out-of-browser app.

Out-of-browser apps don’t work for all scenarios.

I’ll come back to more on the WebBrowser control in a moment but, first, let’s just add in Silverlight 5… When Silverlight 4 arrived and introduced the WebBrowser control which only worked out of browser which kind of made sense given the scenario it was trying to solve Īnd so out-of-browser applications could now display HTML although I think it’s fair to say that the interop layer here is fairly weak compared to the strong interop layer that I talked about between the Silverlight plug-in and its hosting page (in the case where there is one). If you then had a bunch of HTML content to display then life became a little difficult for this class of apps because there was no browser around any more and so HTML display wasn’t possible for out of browser apps until… When Silverlight 3 came along, it was possible to take a Silverlight application out of the browser and you ended up with a situation like this Īnd it’s possible for these applications to run online/offline and to automatically update themselves. Silverlight has a pretty strong interoperability layer between the CLR code running inside the plug-in and the HTML DOM and JavaScript of the surrounding page so you could use Silverlight to exercise some “control” over the hosting HTML/JS and vice versa but HTML was the starting point.Īnd so if you had a bunch of HTML content to display and wanted to mix in a bit of Silverlight then it was fairly clear what your options were until…

The HTML was hosting Silverlight rather than the other way around. In the early days of Silverlight, it was fairly easy to understand that Silverlight content would always be rendered inside of a browser window (whether that be IE, Chrome, Firefox or Safari) where it was surrounded by the hosting HTML content and JavaScript.

Silverlight download standalone