Integrating Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC

One thing that I’m excited about is learning new technologies.  Moving to the Silverlight team, I’ve moved away from a breadth of technology knowledge to something a bit more narrow.  Now I feel like all other developers trying to keep up with the technologies we are releasing.  As such, I’m a beginner for most.  One such technology is ASP.NET MVC, which was just released to release candidate stability.

I thought I’d play around with it in the context of Silverlight and use Silverlight as the “view” in the model-view-controller concept.  It’s easy to link the two.  In fact when you create a new Silverlight project, you now have the option of creating an ASP.NET MVC application as the host

So right from the beginning, you can marry the two together.  Now from here, how can we leverage Silverlight as a view.  Well, here’s my take…learn with me (and comment where you’d do it differently/better and why).

First, I’m still going to create my MVC architecture.  I’m using the Northwind database for simplicity sake in this learning task.  I’ve created a LINQ to SQL data model to that database (which is a local SQLExpress instance).  I then wanted to take the simple task of showing the products by category and displaying them in a simple Silverlight application.

NOTE: Yes, this Silverlight view is basically just a layout of ListBoxes, but remember, this is just a learning experiment for us.  You may also ask yourself about Authentication/Authorization…again, this post is about an experiment and not a full-featured implementation, so there are bound to be missing pieces.

I decided to create a CategoryController and a ProductController which would handle the actions to retrieve list of categories and products and then drill into the detail of a product.  From there I still need some web View to be a container for my real view, the Silverlight application.  I created a View for Category, since essentially that’s the initial view my user would see.  All it is is an index page hosting my Silverlight application

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