What is needed to run Silverlight out-of-browser application on Mac?

Question

The title is all-explaining I think. I want to develop .Net GUI application for Windows that will also run on Mac with no much extra effort. I guess WPF is not right choice here. Anyway, what do I do to make my Silverlight out-of-browser application to run on Mac ? Just install Silverlight on that machine ?

Answer 1

Having built a SL app for OOB on mac, I discovered one bug that gave me hard time. If you are using domain services, and have a method that try's to get the current authentication context to pull the userID on the server side, this will fail. It will work on Windows OOB, but not on Mac OOB.

The work around is pass in the userID from the client side to the domain service queries that need it.

I've had this issue using the standard SL Business app template and confirmed with various users on SL forums.

Answer 2

I have built a state wide Silverlight 4.0 application that runs in browser and out of browser. In my experience it runs very well on a Mac, however I would say that it's not exactly the same. It's very close, but there are small differences in the install experience, and I've received some errors in Isolated Storage that I don't get on a Windows machine.

Overall I would definitely say Silverlight is the best cross platform development platform that I've ever used.

Answer 3

Silverlight's Out of Browser model works great on Mac, and has since its inception. Just develop the app and test it on Windows, it's basically guaranteed to act identically on Mac, unless you rely on a Windows-only feature (such as COM interop in Silverlight 4 Trusted Applications).

Edit: To further clarify my answer, nothing beyond the Silverlight Runtime install is needed to run OOB apps on a Mac. So if the user is able to run you app in-browser to do the install sequence, then they will be able to install the app OOB and use it.

This works with Silverlight 3+ only, of course, as that's when the feature was released. SO if the end-user has Silverlight 1 or 2 installed, they won't be able to install your app, but they could upgrade to the latest runtime to be able to do so (unless they're on a PPC Mac, as that only supports Silverlight 1. But most Macs these days are Intel anyway, so that's not really worth mentioning).

Answer 4

According to Getting Started with Silverlight 3, OOB is available on both Windows and Mac without an additional runtime. Here's a demo of the install process from channel9.

As far as specific hangups, that's beyond my experience. But it sounds like, in general, there are no special requirements to run SL apps out-of-browser on OS X.