Sharing Assemblies between Silverlight and .NET

Writing WPF, Silverlight, and WP7 applications it could be useful to share assemblies between these technologies. Since Silverlight 3 and .NET 4 it is indeed possible to not only share source code but share the same binary assemblies. While this wasn’t very intuitive to do with Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 3 and 4, now there are separate Portable Library Tools that make this process easier. This article describes how to share assemblies with these different technologies, and the limitations.
Sharing Assemblies

With Silverlight 3 and .NET 4 the format of assemblies is the same with these two technologies. However, of course there’s a difference between the Silverlight and the .NET assemblies. To limit the download sizes that are an important aspect of Silverlight, Silverlight assemblies are reduced in functionality compared to the .NET Framework. The .NET assemblies of Silverlight not only have fewer types included, but the types also have fewer members. For example, a simple core type such as the Enum class offers GetNames and GetValues methods to access all the names and values of an enumeration. These methods are not available with the Silverlight assemblies. A .NET programmer knowing the full-blown .NET environment switching to writing applications with Silverlight soon finds out some limitations. Writing assemblies that should be used with both Silverlight and WPF are restricted to the functionality available with both technologies.

To create shared assemblies between Silverlight and WPF it is possible to create a Silverlight class library.

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