Chapter 3. The application model and the plug-in
This chapter covers
- The Silverlight application model
- Creating the Silverlight plug-in control in the browser
Application is an overloaded term that means different things to different people. Some may question what level of footprint, functionality, or other metrics you need to meet before something can be called an application. For example, is the weather tracker sidebar gadget in Windows an application? What about Notepad? The code for the sidebar gadget is almost certainly more complex than Notepad, but most people would see Notepad as an application and the sidebar gadget as, well, a gadget.
In my participation in the Silverlight community, I’ve been asked on a number of occasions what to call the Silverlight “thing” that the plug-in loads in the browser. How I answer that depends on the context of the question and the nature of the Silverlight thing. In this chapter we’re going to talk about Silverlight applications. In the context of this chapter, we’ll use the term application in the technical sense of the word: a compiled runnable Silverlight project. The application can be as small as a tiny menu widget or a “punch the monkey” ad on a web page or as complex as some of the Microsoft and Adobe tools I’ve used to write this book. We’ll leave the other question of when something can be called an application open so we have something interesting to debate at code camp.