Deploying Silverlight content to a production web server is a pretty easy process. Despite occasional misconception, Silverlight doesn’t require a Microsoft-based web server: Apache can host up Silverlight content just as happily as IIS.But there’s one little gotcha: web servers are typically configured to only serve up a limited set of known file extensions as static content. That’s all well and good, but Silverlight introduces two new file extensions (.xaml for loose XAML files and .xap for the zip-based binary packaging format). As a result, you need to add the MIME types for those file extensions to your web server so that it recognizes Silverlight content appropriately. Here are the MIME types you need to add to the server configuration:

That’s all you have to do. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to provide generic instructions for how to add MIME types, as it varies from server to server, but here are some links for various common web servers:

• Apache (2.0, 1.3)
• IIS (7 / 6.0 / 5.0 / 4.0)
• lighttpd
• Sun Java System Web Server

While you’re updating the list of MIME types served, you might want to also add the relevant types to your web server to support WPF and ClickOnce applications. Here are the additional items you’ll need:

But what if you’re hosting your Silverlight application on a shared hosting service and your hoster doesn’t give you access to change these settings? The good news is that there are two options available to you. Obviously, you could take advantage of Silverlight Streaming, our free hosting service for up to 10GB of Silverlight content.

Alternatively, you can “cheat” the web server by renaming the XAP file extension to a compatible MIME type. The XAP container is ZIP-based, so you can simply rename the output file from .xap to .zip and change the source param within the object tag contained in the HTML file to point to the new file location. Click on this hyperlink to see the technique in action - it’s a plain HTML file that points to a ZIP file (containing the Silverlight content).

One last piece of good news: IIS 7, included in Windows Server 2008, already includes all the relevant MIME types for both WPF and Silverlight, including both .xap and .xaml extensions, so if you’re using Windows Server 2008, you’re all set. (The same applies to a clean install of Windows Vista SP1, although if you upgrade from the RTM to the SP1 release, your settings will remain unchanged until you uninstall and reinstall the IIS feature).

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Following on very nicely from my last post on deploying Silverlight content to your own production server, I’m pleased to announce that Silverlight Streaming has added full support for Silverlight 2 applications. As well as adding the basic support, the team have put a lot of work into simplifying the process of uploading and validating your application. Here’s a basic walkthrough:

1. Create your Silverlight 2 application using Visual Studio or Expression Blend, do all the usual test / debug steps, etc.
2. Create a manifest file named manifest.xml, that describes how you want the control to be hosted. Here’s a simple sample you can use as a template:

   <SilverlightApp>   <version>2.0</version>   <source>PopTheBubble.xap</source>   <width>400</width>   <height>300</height>   <background>white</background>   <isWindowless>false</isWindowless> </SilverlightApp>

3. Zip your application .xap and manifest.xml files together into one file.
4. Go to silverlight.live.com and upload the application.
5. You’re done! Now you can embed the resulting content in any web page with an iframe or the sample code provided.

As a small example, here’s a mini-game called PopTheBubble that you can learn to build by following the Silverlight 2 fundamentals hands-on lab. Click on as many bubbles as you can before the timer runs out - have fun!

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It is with tremendous pleasure that I can reveal Microsoft Silverlight: our next-generation, cross-platform, cross-browser web client runtime. Silverlight (previously codenamed “WPF/E”) is a lightweight subset of XAML for building rich media experiences on the web.There’s lots of material at the NAB virtual press room site, but I thought I’d share my top ten list of reasons why you might want to use Silverlight:

1. It supports playback of WMV files on both PC and Macintosh, with many options for interactivity during playback; with just a couple of lines of code, you can provide a platform-neutral way to handle all your movie files. Silverlight supports full-screen 720p video and offers seamless transitions between full-screen and windowed mode without losing your position in the video (something that media sites are crying out for today). 
2. By separating markup (XAML) from code, Silverlight provides a familiar web metaphor for designers and developers. You can embed XAML directly within an HTML file if you want a simple, monolithic solution, or you can keep the two separate to enforce a delineation between different web development roles.
3. Silverlight and HTML integrate seamlessly together. Every XAML element can be accessed or manipulated from the same client-side JavaScript that would be used to interact with any DHTML element: there are no artificial boundaries or barriers, and you can even overlay HTML elements on top of Silverlight content (simply by creating a windowless frame). We’ll also make it very easy for an ASP.NET AJAX developer to add Silverlight content.
4. You can embed XAML directly into your HTML pages; there’s nothing binary or opaque about the format. There are only three steps necessary to add animation or media to your RIA application: (i) include a standard JavaScript file in your HTML header; (ii) call a function to create the Silverlight object anywhere on the screen; (iii) add some XAML content (an animation, some media) for runtime delivery.
5. You have full runtime interactivity with Silverlight content. The contents of the XAML file can be completely server-generated, to contain information populated from a database. From JavaScript, it’s just a matter of calling the createFromXaml method to add or remove elements dynamically at runtime. There’s nothing that you can only create or manipulate at design-time.
6. Silverlight is just a 1MB download on a PC (slightly more on a Macintosh because the universal package contains both Intel and PowerPC versions); it supports Windows XP and above, with Windows 2000 support to come.
7. Silverlight is blindingly fast - for example, you can play many videos simultaneously without stuttering or dropping frames (subject to network bandwidth, of course). We’re introducing a new video brush in Silverlight that allows you to use video as a texture for any 2D object (a rectangle, an ellipse or a path). This is going to allow designers incredible power to use media in new ways that have never been accessible through other existing technologies.
8. Silverlight is both client- and server-agnostic. There’s no difference between the Macintosh and PC runtimes; you don’t need any Microsoft software on the server if you don’t want to - you can deliver a great Silverlight experience from an Apache / Linux server to a Mac OS 10.4 client.
9. Silverlight is almost 100% upward compatible with WPF. Animation, 2D vector graphics, media, text - they’re all present in Silverlight and the concepts you’ve learnt in WPF carry forward (although Silverlight is a subset - it doesn’t support WPF features such as 3D, data binding or templates). You can use the same tools (e.g. Expression Design) to generate content for Silverlight; you can take XAML from Silverlight and use it in a WPF application when you want to scale up and take full advantage of your local machine.
10. Ah… #10. I can’t reveal this yet - there’s a big surprise up our collective corporate sleeve that will be announced at MIX. I hate to hold back on you, but anticipation is part of the pleasure, as my mother used to tell me as a child when I was waiting impatiently for Christmas to come!

Now that Windows Vista is done, I’ll be shifting the focus of my blog slightly - I’ll still write just as much about WPF, but I’ll also start to write about its web-based little brother, since they both are part of the same continuum and my day-to-day job incorporates both technologies equally. Rich interactive web-based and Windows-based content; it’s an exciting time to be a client platform evangelist!

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