Recently I ran into a situation where I wanted to host an ASP.NET MVC web application and Silverlight application in Windows Azure. The ASP.NET application provides all of the backend services for the Silverlight application. This was all well and good until I decided to move the Silverlight XAP file from the ClientBin directory of the web application over to Blob Storage so that I could update the XAP file without the need to redeploy the entire site.

That’s when it broke.

When moving a XAP file to a different “site of origin” than the website, there are a number of cross domain issues that are potentially introduced. Tim Heuer has and excellent blog post “Hosting cross-domain Silverlight Applications” in which he details the main concerns and how to address the issues. In my case, it was the “XAP MIME Type” issue causing the problem. When Windows Azure Blob Storage was serving up the XAP file, it was not correctly indicating the “application/x-silverlight-app” MIME type. For security reasons Silverlight checks to see that the content is a valid Silverlight type, in my case not allowing the XAP file to run.

I had tried using a couple of utilities to copy my content into blog storage, which had seemed to work fine for image and video files, but not the XAP file and did not allow me to set the content types manually. [UPDATE: Azure Explorer will allow you to update MIME Types: http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/ ] To resolve the problem, I needed to upload a file to storage and set it’s mime type to “application/x-silverlight-app”. In the end, this is pretty simple to do so I crafted a little utility to properly deploy my XAP file using the following code.

var account = new CloudStorageAccount(storageKeys, true);
var container = account.CreateCloudBlobClient().GetContainerReference("clientbin");
container.CreateIfNotExist();
container.SetPermissions(new BlobContainerPermissions { PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Blob });
 
var blob = container.GetBlobReference(System.IO.Path.GetFileName(fileName));
blob.Properties.ContentType = "application/x-silverlight-app";
blob.UploadFile(fileName);

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If you’re looking at getting up to speed with some Windows Azure training , here are some webcast dates for you to mark down and register for, including the upcoming Firestarter event!

12/09: MSDN Simulcast Event: Windows Azure Firestarter

11/29: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Introduction to Cloud Computing and Windows Azure
12/06: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Windows Azure and Web Roles
12/13: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Worker Roles
01/03: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Working with Messaging and Queues
01/10: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Using Windows Azure Table
01/17: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Diving into BLOB Storage
01/24: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Diagnostics and Service Management
01/31: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: SQL Azure
02/07: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Connecting with AppFabric
02/14: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Cloud Computing Scenarios

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At the Silverlight Firestarter event today in Redmond (And broadcast live around the world) Scott Guthrie kicked off the show with a very exciting look ahead at some of the planned features for Silverlight 5. There were two strong themes to these new features “Premium Media Experiences” and “Business Application Development”.

The enhancements to media include Hardware Decode and presentation of H.264 using GPU support improving performance for lower power devices as well as “Trick Play” capabilities to play videos at different speeds (Up to 2x) with pitch correction. Improved power awareness will keep the screensaver from appearing while video is playing, but also allows the system to sleep when video is paused. Remote control support will also be added to media.

On the “Application” front, features improving text clarity and layout performance and “Fluid” layout capabilities. OpenType support has been enhanced and tracking/leading have been added. Enhancements have also been added for MVVM support and Databinding enhancements.I swear I could here Josh Smith’s excitement all the way in here in NC when he heard that Markup Extensions were being added as well. I think one of the coolest demos of the day was John Papa setting breakpoints in XAML (Yes, in XAML) and having the debugger stop when bindings were hit, providing the ability to step through the binding process and make solving problems easier. A GPU accelerated API was also shown, providing rich 3d visualization capabilities.

If you’re interested, a complete list of future features is available here as well as be sure to check out Scott’s Blog, Pete’s Blog, and Tim’s Blog for the latest info. (For info on the latest release of the WCF Ria Services Toolkit, check out Jeff’s Blog!) The information shared today was a strong indication of the continued commitment Microsoft has to Silverlight, and the exciting opportunities that exist for developers on the web, on devices, and on the desktop with Silverlight!

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