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Providing a great Silverlight deployment experience

Posted by jasper22 at 04:34 | Tuesday, June 28, 2011
If you are doing Silverlight development, you are no doubt slapping in the tag or using the control (if in ASP.NET) to host your Silverlight content/application.  This is all great, but don't forget about deployment!

When I talk about Silverlight I like to relay a story I heard from one of the Silverlight program managers (PM) a while back.  The PM was pretty excited about a feature just completed in Silverlight and one of the samples that had been created.  He went home to show his wife and told her to 'go to 'dub-dub-dub-dot-something-dot-com' (yelling from the other room of course) and to tell him what she thought.  After a long pause of a few minutes he shouted back 'what do you think?'  Her response: 'It's lame.'  He was no doubt offended until he walked up to her machine and on the screen saw this:

?LinkID=92801&clcid=0x409

The Problem

You see, 'Get Silverlight' means nothing to your mother-in-law (or wife in this matter).  Technology means nothing to non-geek users.  Content is king.  And to your non-savvy users (and even your savvy ones), leaving this default experience isn't a wise one.  It doesn't convey that there is anything of value by installing something they might not have.  It doesn't even convey what the action is going to be when they 'Get Microsoft Silverlight.'  Leaving this experience unchecked leaves your users in the dark as well as a reputation rank downward in my opinion.

    NOTE: This site is likely riddled with these badges as seen above.  I'm claiming exempt status because they are samples :-).

While in Silverlight 1.0 creating a great install experience was possible, Silverlight 2 makes that process so much easier.  In Silverlight 1.0, the use of the silverlight.js file could aid in detection and direction to an alternate experience.  This method is still possible in Silverlight 2, and in fact might be a best practice still.  Most interactive developers using Flash use some method of script creation in instantiating the Flash host.  This is mostly due to the IE EOLAS "click to activate" issue that has been resolved and will remedy in an upcoming IE update.

Some Solutions

So that brings a few methods for instantiating the Silverlight control host.  You can still use a script method to do the check for you and provide alternate content or redirect to something.  You can also still simply include the tag itself.  My favorite is using the simple tag and tricking the HTML.  You see an object tag might look like this:


   
   
   
   
Some descriptive information


Read more: Method of ~ failed ~
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