Question

I have a Silverlight app that takes a few seconds to display on a webpage. While loading, the user sees a blank space. Is there a way to show some sort of alt text or background image behind the application while it is loading to indicate to the user what is happening?

Answer 1

Based on the above link posted by danbord, I found that this can be accomplished via a splash screen. Basically, the splash screen will be loaded while the .xap is still being downloaded for a silverlight application. This can be implemented as follows:

1. Create splash screen .xaml file (this can be done in Visual Studio by creating a Silverlight 1.0 JScript page)

2. Add a splashScreenSource parameter to your object tag in the webpage hosting your silverlight application. This should point to the .xaml file created in step 1.

It is important that the value of the splashscreen param resolve to the correct location of the .xaml file relative to the page the silverlight app is hosted in. For example, if your SplashScreen.xaml file is in your website root, but the page hosting your silverlight app is in a subfolder, you will need to use

<param name="splashScreenSource" value="../SplashScreen.xaml" />

There are also other options that can be added such as attaching an event handler to the onSourceDownloadProgressChanged event to update a progress bar or some other UI animation.