Offline Apps in Silverlight?
I’ve just returned from PDC and I’m starting to recover, what a huge amount of information in a few days. I also met some great people, from Microsoft and others. With many of the sessions available online, it really has turned the need to go to conferences into more for the social aspects and less for seeing the sessions. I’ll be catching up on sessions I missed that were going at the same time for days.
The most interesting announcement to me was that you will be able to write mesh enabled web applications that run “outside the browser” and can run in an offline mode. These can be written in Silverlight or in other web technologies. You can think of this as similar to Adobe’s AIR platform.
So how does it work? It’s actually pretty clever. I’ll do my best to explain how I think it works bet I may get some of it slightly wrong technically.
When you install the Live Mesh client on your machine, you get the Live Mesh runtime and you also get a process that you can communicate with locally that proxies your Mesh requests to the Live Mesh Server. This is the process that the Mesh enabled application talks to to get the XAP file and any data it needs. This process handles HTTP requests just like the server in the cloud does. By talking to a local server, the application can work without a connection to the internet.
Now for the outside the browser part. It’s technically not outside the browser since the applications run in a process that hosts a browser control which I would guess is the Internet Explorer control on Windows, and would probably be a Webkit based control on Mac.
I have some ideas already about how to use this new technology and I think it will make for some really interesting possibilities. Think of it as social networks for applications.