Silverlight and ICE

[kwaclaw]

Microsoft is about to release a .NET cross-platform plugin for web browsers (Windows and Mac, IE and Mozilla, etc.) called Silverlight. This is similar to Java applets, Adobe Flash, etc., and provides rich GUI capabilities in the browser.

The plugin provides its own - smaller - version of .NET 2.0/3.0, so applications built against it have to use a somewhat reduced set of framework libraries, and also permissions (sandbox). They must link against a separate set of assemblies, including the core assemblies (mscorlib.dll, system.dll).

Here is the problem I have: I had the idea that, instead of calling a web service from the Silverlight code (running in the browser), I would call an ICE service instead. However, icecs.dll is built against the standard .NET framework, so it won't work with the Silverlight framework. I am sure, most of the code for icecs.dll would compile against Silverlight OK, but there are a few areas that would not work, as they use the Windows API directly (the network layer, I think).

Has anyone any ideas on the subject?
It would be nice if ICE worked on a sandboxed CLR.

Karl

[marc]

We are investigating Silverlight, but don't have any concrete plans yet. If you have a commercial need for such a development, please contact us at info@zeroc.com.

[kwaclaw]

Silverlight 1.1 is currently in Alpha and still doesn't expose the Socket API yet.
So, you still have time ... :-)

However, I can imagine that a lot of new applications (even traditional desktop apps) will be built using Silverlight instead of the full .NET framework. At least this seems to be where our organization will be going.

Karl