How does Silverlight deal with proxies for internet connectivity?

Question

I'm trying to clearup a few questions about Silverlight to see if it's suitable for a project I've got comming up. A question I've not been able to answer is with regard to proxy connections.

Does connecting to the internet via a proxy add any complexity to the application, or is it handled transparently?

Answer 1

Silverlight uses the browser's infrastructure for web requests. Therefore it will use the same proxy settings that the browser is configured to use.

Answer 2

What Joel said is correct. In addition in SL3 you can decide to use Silverlight's networking infrastructure instead of the browser's one. You switch to it with

HttpWebRequest.RegisterPrefix("http://", WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);

Be careful because in that case the OS proxy settings are used instead of the browser settings.

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As for out-of-browser mode, I just did a simple test:

var req = HttpWebRequest.Create("http://www.google.com");
if (req.CreatorInstance == WebRequestCreator.BrowserHttp)
    MessageBox.Show("Browser");
else
    MessageBox.Show("Client");

and found that the browser's stack is the default in OOB too. They probably load some IE component, thus it should use the IE proxy settings as well.