C H A P T E R  17

Application Deployment

After you have developed your application in Silverlight, you then need to ensure that you deliver it in an effective manner to your users. One of Silverlight's advantages is that it makes it very easy to install and run applications on your end-user's computer. All that the user needs is a browser and a web connection. With just those two things you can have a “clean” PC up and running with a Silverlight application in a matter of minutes, with both the Silverlight runtime and the application deployed to the user's machine automatically (with their permission), and with no machine restarts necessary.

As we all know, first impressions are important. The first impression that the user will have of your application is waiting for it to download, and very possibly requiring the installation of Silverlight itself. Therefore, you need to ensure that they have the best experience possible, as their experience here can greatly shape their opinion and acceptance of the application.

This chapter will take you through how to deploy your Silverlight applications to both the server and the clients, and we will also take a look at how you can improve on the default installation experience to help entice users to make the leap and install Silverlight in order to run your application.