The other day I was reading a blog from Miguel de Icaza on moonlight and hosting Silverlight application locally as desklet’s (or something like that) and his thoughts that MS should introduce functionality with the Silverlight implementation. My first inclination was ‘Why’. To me it seemed strange to want to want to bring back a reduced function set to the desktop. Given that we as developers have access to the full 3.5 .Net framework with WCF, WPF, and all of the other goodness without having to code around the limitations. The argument seemed strange to me. However given that there is no reason that Silverlight applications cannot be hosted locally given;

1. A local web server can be implemented in the Casinni (ASP.net hosting server example)

2. IE browser can be hosted in a web form app. To make it look a little nicer the window can be made borderless

3. Wire up the target URL in the App.config file on the startup that will load in the application

Given that all of this things are do-able today and if you look at MS Mesh you can see some indications of this then the local hosting is no big deal and really is only a matter of customer need.

– Mark