I am new to Silverlight and web development and I was wondering if there was a way to update a Silverlight application while clients are running it. For example, suppose you can have many clients running the app. 24/7 and you want to do an update, how can you do it without losing compatibility with the clients currently running it? I know that if I stop, recompile and start the server, clients only have to do F5 and they will get the latest version, but that is not desirable if they are in the middle of processing something important.
Any idea how to achieve this?
This actually can work. You can dynamically load a xap file. Just structure your app in such a way that you can update and deploy parts of the application. You’ll need to build an updater service that will watch for changes and prompt the user to update a specific component.
Check out this article on dynamic loading of xap.