Deploying Silverlight Applications

Silverlight XAP Files

Silverlight applications are downloaded by the browser in XAP files. These XAP files are essentially .zip files that contain an assembly manifest file and one or more assemblies.

Preparing Your Web Server to Host Silverlight Applications

Silverlight applications can be hosted on most types of Web servers, like Internet Information Server (IIS) or Apache. However, most Web servers are usually configured to serve only a short list of well-known file extensions. To allow Silverlight applications to be served from your Web server, you have to allow the MIME types in the following table to be served.



Deploying the Application

To deploy a Silverlight application and the modules that are remotely loaded, the XAP files must be made accessible on the Web server. There are several ways to accomplish this:

* You can manually copy all the XAP files to a public folder on the Web server.
* You can create a Web project or a Web site on the same solution that contains the Silverlight application and add a reference to all the projects in the solution that generate a XAP file as output (usually the main application and the remote modules) as Silverlight Applications, as shown in Figure 1. This creates a new folder named ClientBin and copies the generated XAP files. These files will be kept in synchronization by Visual Studio. Finally, the Web project or Web site must be deployed on the Web server.



Adding the remote modules as Silverlight applications

Optimizing XAP Files for Download Speed

By default, any non-system assemblies that you reference will be added to the XAP file generated by Silverlight applications. If you want to optimize your XAP files for download speed, this behavior may not be efficient for some of your modules' references.

Consider the following example. You have created an application with several remote modules. Each module gets its own XAP file. You have also created a shared Common assembly that contains shared services, common interfaces, and so on. Each module references that common assembly. By default, each XAP file will now also contain the Common assembly; this makes the XAP files larger than they need to be.

To solve this, change the references to the Common assembly in all of the modules by setting Copy Local to false. This ensures that the Common assembly is not added to the XAP files.

When deploying Silverlight applications created with the Composite Application Library, some common assemblies that can typically be excluded from the XAP files include Composite and Composite.Presentation assemblies and infrastructure assemblies, among others.

Web Design - Even Error Pages Can Bring You Users

I was talking recently to a friend of mine who is a bit of a web guru. Now I thought that I knew quite a bit about web design and usage, but maybe I'm not as smart as I thought.

We were talking about error pages and he told me something that I had never heard before. “Of course you can customize your error pages”.

I was amazed. He nearly fell off his chair laughing at me when I said that I always thought those 404 error pages came from some central internet point beyond my reach and that they all looked exactly the same.

When he had calmed down a little, he patiently explained that an there are scores of error codes covering many different situations. They are all three digits, such as 500 – Server Error, 408 – Request Timeout and of course the familiar 404 – Not found, which most of us see fairly regularly.

He went on to say that 404 errors are sometimes caused by users incorrectly typing in a page name, but quite often it can be just a communication glitch between one end and the other and if you hit refresh, you’ll usually get right back on track.

Despite what I thought, the content of error pages does not come from some omnipotent global hub, some kind of web-central, but are in fact pages held on the server of your web host. When an error condition is picked up, the host simply serves up the error page.

Now that means that you can replace their standard error pages with something of your own and simply tell the host to serve that instead. All of which got me to thinking.

What if instead of infuriating my users with a bland standard page of techno-babble, I gave them something to make them smile and help them get back on track. My friend explained that we simply needed to create two files and upload them to my site.

The first one is the replacement error page itself. I decided we should give it the same look and feel as the rest of my site, so we added the banner at the top and some of the navigation links. Then I entered a cheery message saying “Oops, sorry – something’s gone wrong. It happens sometimes, but don’t worry, it’s not serious. Click here and we’ll have you back on track in no time” Then at the bottom is a simple link to take people back to my homepage.

If you have a particularly complex site with thousands of pages, then you might want to lead people to a sitemap first or give them some category links so they could start to figure out at least which section they want to get to.

The second file is one called .htaccess. This is a little text file, which contains a few lines of code telling your web-host which errors to pick up and which page to show in which event. Simple. Well simple for my friend anyway, but he assures me that anyone halfway competent can do it. In fact he says that your web-host will probably have full instructions on their help pages.

So what’s the point of doing this? Well firstly we’re all impatient with the web and as soon as anything goes wrong we want to jump off somewhere else. You don’t want to lose your potential customers that way, so this is a chance to hang on to them, just when they’re about to disappear.

Secondly, as any good web marketer knows, any chance that you have to make a positive impression is worth grabbing. We spend hours agonizing over the wording of our autoresponder e-mails in order to ensure that we build a solid relationship with our prospects, so why can’t we also get a little bit of our friendly personality across on an error page too.
So take a closer look at your error pages and learn to make them lovable.

By Andrew Grant
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How to improve your spoken English

Improve Your English Speaking and English Pronunciation Skills

As a result, here are a few tips that I have collected to help improve Spoken English.

Tip No # 1 Get comfortable with the language. Read for 20 minutes in English. It can be a newspaper, a short story, a poem, or even a novel.

Tip No # 2 Develop your written language. If you don't have the requisite vocabulary you won't be able to communicate.

Tip No # 3 Start Speaking. Try out your spoken English on anyone who will be able to respond to you. Don't be afraid of making mistakes.

Tip No # 4 Keep your ears open for the accent. Watch the English news on Television. Watch BBC for the British Accent, CNN for the American Accent and NDTV 24/7 for the urban Indian Accent.

Tip No # 5 Record yourself. Listen to your voice and catch your pronunciation mistakes. Make a deliberate effort to avoid them.

Tip No # 6 Grammar is important. The parts of speech, tenses, form of verb, articles and modals all contribute to fluency. Make an effort to learn them.

Tip No # 7 Make the Dictionary your best friend. To date I head for it when confronted with a new word. Familiarize yourself with its meaning and use it in a sentence that very day.

Tip No # 8 Have someone proficient read aloud to you. A storybook or a newspaper article will do. Watch how they move their lips while pronouncing certain words.

Tip No # 9 Learn one new word a day. To increase your active vocabulary start memorizing the meaning of a word you had heard but were not sure of. Use it regularly to absorb it into your vocabulary.

Tip No # 10 Start writing a Diary. It will allow you to practice the language in a totally non threatening environment. Write one entry of at least 100 words everyday.