Question

I’m new to Silverlight and I’ve used it to create a simple datagrid that I’d like to include as part of a view within an ASP.NET MVC View (while using the existing master page layout).

What’s the best way to do this? I haven’t been able to find any examples…

Answer 1

You would simply embed a Silverlight application containing your grid into your MVC View markup. ASP.NET MVC just outputs HTML of course so at a basic level all you are doing is adding an HTML object tag to your page markup that will load your Silverlight .xap file.

e.g.

<object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%">
          <param name="source" value="MySilverlightApplication.xap"/>
          <param name="background" value="white" />
          <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50401.0" />
          <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />
          <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50401.0" style="text-decoration:none">
              <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/>
          </a>
        </object>

A potentially more tricky question is how will you load the data into your Silverlight grid control and that depends of course on where your data comes from. Typically data would be loaded into your Silverlight control via a call to a WCF web service.