Silverlight Hosting in WPF

Ok so we know this has been done. Yawn, and it can be done any number of ways from hacking it in a browser control but actually doing it in WPF without the browser control can be a huge pain. Here is a little trick that helps you do just that without all the jumping around.

Jeremiah, (this programmer extraordinaire with apparently WAY to much time on his hands) wrote this little codeplex project that is a 'WPF Panel' that hosts Silverlight. http://silverlightviewport.codeplex.com/

pretty slick, if you dive into the code it is kind of complicated but to use it is straight forward enough. If you download the project and run it you can see it in his test application running a xap in Window1.xaml.

<slvp:SilverlightViewportElement BaseUrl="http://silverlight.net/"
Source="http://silverlight.net/clientBin/showcasenav/ShowcaseNav.xap"
ViewportSize="550,550"
RenderFps="40"
x:Name="slViewport">
<slvp:SilverlightViewportElement.Effect>
<DropShadowEffect BlurRadius="50" />
</slvp:SilverlightViewportElement.Effect>
<slvp:SilverlightViewportElement.LayoutTransform>
<RotateTransform Angle="10" />
</slvp:SilverlightViewportElement.LayoutTransform>
</slvp:SilverlightViewportElement>

you'll notice this is all the standard WPF fare but lets look at the properties on the main panel itself. First is our base url that tells the control the domain in which the xap or silverlight application lives. Next we have the 'Source' which points to our xap file. We then set a view port size as 'ViewportSize' and then the last one we will mention is 'RenderFps' which is the 'speed' that the Silverlight is 'rendered' into your panel. In effect your app now runs in the WPF app. Nice and clean as long as you don't look at the source for the panel which is more a work of art... :)