Silverlight app hosted in browser control prompting

Question

I have a Silverlight application that I can run from Internet Explorer 8. When I attempt to host it in a Winforms browser control as described here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/198360/silverlight-hosted-in-winforms it display a web page that says "To view this content, please install" and has a "Click now to install" button.

Unfortunately, SL4 is already installed. However I did try to follow the instructions. But was prompted, of course, that SL4 was already installed on my system.

I seems that at one spot IE/Silverlight cannot see that Silverlight runtime is installed, but at anoter spot it can see it. This has become a significant roadblock. The client OS is Win 7 64-bit. I have no idea if other versions of OS are exhibiting the same problem.

Answer 1

Silverlight (the plugin) is 32-bit only. You can not run it from a 64-bit application.

If you can [easily] force the application to run in a 32-bit context, then you're in luck -- change the "target" of the VS project from "Machine Independent" to "x86".

The above situation describes exactly what I ran into when trying to run SL (32-bit) in a Windows Sidebar Gadget (default 64-bit on Windows 7 64-bit); this is somewhat interesting, it implies that all (or at least almost all of) the components behind IE are 64-bit ready. The "holdup" and why IE normally only runs in 32-bit is that it's a chick-and-egg problem with all the plugins, BHOs, and ActiveX components used. However, the (IE) Browser Host will happily run as 64-bit.