Multiple Out-of-Browser Applications in One Application

Question

I'm looking at a scenario where I need to create a single "master" Silverlight application and then add "child" applications for an out-of-browser Silverlight application.

The scenario is something like this.

A user will visit a gameboard web site and choose a game to play. Let's call it Checkers. He likes it, so then he installs the out-of-browser app to his desktop. He then finds Chess, and installs that too. For both games, while played on the site, he has stats (games played, win/loss records, etc.). For each game on the site, he navigates to a different page.

But now he wants to play offline and view his stats and other cross-games information. He wants to have a single app to launch to play either game. From his single out-of-browser app, he sees that Go is also available, and he places a checkmark against it to download on his next connection.

Does anyone have any experience at developing multiple out-of-browser Silverlight apps that reside within a single master app? What considerations need to be had for this type of design? How would this work in terms of install experience from different web pages?

Answer 1

Is there a reason why every game must be a separate application? It would be much easier to just install the master application as an OOB app and then have it load new XAPs from IsolatedStorage at runtime depending on what games the user has downloaded (installed). Or perhaps I am misunderstanding your scenario?

Answer 2

What you need is MEF (which will be included in the CLR of the upcoming Microsoft .NET Framework 4) You Can read more about it here , here & there's an example here