Chapter 4. Integrating with the browser

Silverlight has always been a web technology, integrated into the web page. Even when a Silverlight application took over the entire browser client area, it was still contained within several layers of HTML tags. Given the history, it makes sense that a Silverlight plug-in would have complete access to the Document Object Model (DOM) on the page in which it resides. In fact, the access is so complete that a Silverlight application could take over all of the functionality normally provided by JavaScript if you wanted to go that route.

Despite the out-of-browser capability introduced with Silverlight 3, as a RIA technology, Silverlight is and will remain for the foreseeable future most popular as a browser plug-in. There’s just too much synergy between the nature of a HTML application and the power of a .NET-based RIA plug-in like Silverlight to completely abandon that approach.

Silverlight 4 added the ability for Silverlight to host HTML within itself. Though currently restricted to out-of-browser applications (the topic of the next chapter), the integration is provided by the default browsing engine in the operating system and supports some script integration.

4.1. Silverlight and the HTML DOM

4.2. Managing the web page from managed code

4.3. Working with the user’s browser window

4.4. Bridging the scripting and managed code worlds

4.5. Hosting HTML in Silverlight

4.6. Summary