Silverlight 3 – Out of Browser Applications on the Mac

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At the webdd on Saturday, a couple of people asked me about Silverlight 3 Out-Of-The-Browser applications ( or SLOOBs ) and questioned;

  1. Whether the actually work on the Mac
  2. What the experience is like for the user

It occurred to me that this might be a reasonably common question for developers who are working on Windows and don’t have a Mac with OS X on it kicking around so that they can try these things out.

SLOOBs do work fine on the Mac and I thought I’d make a short screencast where we build a simple SLOOB ( similar to the one that I used for demo purposes on Saturday ) and then deploy it to my iMac (running Leopard) and see what the Out-Of-The-Browser experience looks like over there.

Here’s the video on Channel9 ( note – this is just a picture that jumps to the C9 page );

image

In discussing SLOOBs on the Mac we had a slightly more general discussion around whether there were any features that were Windows specific in Silverlight and I managed to come up with one or two e.g.;

  • The Windowless parameter on the plug-in is a Windows only thing because Windowless is always true on the Mac
  • The enableFramerateCounter parameter on the plug-in was IE specific although I notice in Silverlight 3 this is being done in a different way which makes it work in FireFox.

but I’m pretty confident that the total number of differences is tiny and they are like the ones above – i.e. a small technical limitation that blocks an optional feature.

Enjoy.