How can I create a hybrid Silverlight and aspx application

Question

Here is my scenerio..

We have an ASP.Net 2.x web site. We want to migrate it to Silverlight full frame application. However, there is no way we can go away in a corner and redo every web page in SL right off the bat.

What I would like to do is build the chrome of the app (main page, dashboard, login, common system/config screens, main menu) in SL and be able to open existing .aspx pages in the main content SL frame.

From what I see there is no way to do this. I thought the Webbrowser control in SL4 would be the answer, but apparently that only works if your app is run out of browser.

So, what is my best recourse? It seems like I will have to create some type of .aspx page that hosts the .XAP and pass in the page I want it to load?

How would you gurus approach this?

Answer 1

I would actually go the opposite route actually. Intead of building the full dashboard, i would begin building the dashboard elements separately as much as you can. This will give you time to refactor your individual applications one by one until you're ready to integrate them all.

One method we considered on my team was to build our SL rendering engine to render our aspx into SL controls, but when we saw the scope of that we decided it would be easier just to begin developing everything in SL from scratch.