is there an existing 'Silverlight assemblies via CDN' option similar to how Google/Microsoft offer up jquery?

Question

One of the things I really miss from javascript/jquery work is being able to have major pieces (jquery, common plugins) served up to the client via CDN. It has lots of benefits (hosting costs, startup time, cross-app caching, etc.)

• http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/
• http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx

It seems like the needed heavy lifting is already in place with Silverlight's support for Application Library Caching, at least in terms of something that could be done 'automatically'. I'd imagine the CDN would just need a clientaccesspolicy.xml allowing it, and likely some change in the Application Library Caching support for it to look at places other than the xap source for the support libraries (although maybe that already exists and I just haven't found it?).

Certainly I could take my assemblies and do a 'manual' approach (upload them to S3 or somewhere), but assuming I'm using a 'standard' build of a library (MVVM Light, Caliburn.Micro, etc. etc.), it seems like this would have the same kind of community-wide benefit for Silverlight apps that the existing CDN's have to jQuery apps.

Is this already a solved problem? And if so, where's the project/code that does so? :)

Thanks!

Answer 1

I believe in the early stages of the Application Library Caching development there was to be some concept of Microsoft delivering common library zips. However for some undisclosed reason this concept did not make it in to the release. App Library Caching only works from the original source folder.

It sounds like a nice idea but I don't think has any legs. The CDN concept works when there is a large body of websites using a common CDN. Silverlight just isn't in enough common use amongst many web sites to make a CDN approach really worthwile even for the most common SDK dlls let alone the thirdy party dlls.