I recently started reading up on the out-of-browser ability of Silverlight 3. I also noticed that quite a few people here speak of Prism. I only had a brief time to read up on the topics.
However, from what I read, both of them perform the same role. What are the differences between the two, and if they are the same, why do people use Prism over the out-of-browser option?
Thanks
They are very different technologies.
Prism is a composite application framework (+ guidance). It allows you to build your application in a modular fashion.
Silverlight 3's out-of-browser support allows you to run your Silverlight application on the desktop (with a start menu shortcut).
You could absolutely build an out-of-browser SL3 application using Prism.
The biggest difference I can see if that Mozilla Prism still runs the web app. So it doesn't seem to have the notion of an offline mode - I don't know Mozilla Prism so I'm purely going by what I can gather from http://prism.mozilla.com/features/
Silverlight Out Of Browser can be installed and ran even when the connection is unreliable or broken. There are API methods that can detect and tell you if the connection to the internet is lost.
in SL4 (http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/) the OOB story goes crazier with offline DRM, toast notification support, as well as the new trusted mode.