World’s Smallest Silverlight App ;-)

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Just a bit of fun really but I was pondering over breakfast what the absolute smallest Silverlight “app” is that you can build?

I made a vanilla web site project in Visual Studio and stared at the object tag instantiating the plug-in; 

    <form id="form1" runat="server" style="height:100%">
    <div id="silverlightControlHost">
        <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%">
		  <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SmallApp.xap"/>
		  <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" />
		  <param name="background" value="white" />
		  <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50826.0" />
		  <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />
		  <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50826.0" style="text-decoration:none">
 			  <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/>
		  </a>
	    </object><iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe></div>
    </form>

I figured that most of this could quite happily be discarded without too much damage and I added a splash screen; 

<form id="form1" runat="server" style="height: 100%">
  <div id="silverlightControlHost">
    <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2"
      width="100%" height="100%">
      <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SmallApp.xap" />
      <param name="splashScreenSource" value="ClientBin/splash.xaml" />
    </object>
    </div>
  </form>

The form and the div could go as well. I was secretly hoping that I could leave out the source parameter and have the app purely displaying the contents from the splash screen which looks like;

<Canvas
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation">
  <TextBlock Text="Hello, I'm Silverlight" FontSize="36"/>
</Canvas>

but if I omit the source then I find that nothing gets displayed so I guess I have to at least point at a XAP file. Could it be an empty XAP file?

And then I remembered. There was a time before XAP files when Silverlight apps were just loose XAML files and (Silverlight being backwardly compatible) that should still work. So maybe I could forget the XAP and go with;

    <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2"
      width="100%" height="100%">
      <param name="source" value="ClientBin/splash.xaml" />
    </object>

So, here it is below with a shiny blue background. Hopefully it doesn’t take too long to load…