Question

I am developing a Silverlight 4 application and I want to enable/disable some features when deploying the app locally for testing purposes.

For example, metrics collecting will be disabled when I test the application locally to avoid spamming my database of “live” metrics.

The way that I am currently doing this is by checking the host name. For example, in my App.xaml.cs file:

if (HtmlPage.Document.DocumentUri.Host == "localhost")
{
    // Do stuff only when deployed locally
}

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

I create two html pages to test my code, for example mysilverlightpage.html and myslpage.notracking.html. Then in the object embed tag for myslpage.notracking.html I add an initparam:

<param name="InitParams" value="noTracking=true" />

Then in my code, I do a check on my InitParams params:

if (!App.Current.Host.InitParams.ContainsKey("noTracking") || bool.Parse(App.Current.Host.InitParams["noTracking"]) == false)
{
    // perform tracking here
}

Now it’s possible to check the release version for functionality without invalidating your tracking metrics.