Silverlight behind firewall not letting XAP files through

Question

We've got a client who wants to use a SilverLight application hosted on our servers. However they have problems accessing the application. The Silverlight host webpage throws a 2103 error. It seems the XAP file is not directly downloaded to the browser, but is redirected by the firewall to a page where the firewall scans the XAP file before sending it through the browser as a download.

Is there a way to work around this problem? Or does anybody ever had this problem before? Unfortunately the firewall administrators cannot prevent the .XAP files from being scanned so they will be served directly.

We tried a "hack" to rename the .XAP file to .JPG so it prevents the scanning of the file and streaming it directly, but this didn't worked either.

Somebody any ideas?

Answer 1

After trying a couple of things a variant on the JPG hack seems to work. We modified the request to the XAP file as: /ClientBin/app.xap?file.jpg

However I understand this is no real solution, we will try to adjust the firewall rules to just pass through XAP files.

Answer 2

I have never tried this but it's worth a shot:

Enable running the silverlight app out-of-browser (in visual studio: project properties -> silvelright, check the checkbox). Then, send them the xap file, and have them install the app using sllauncher.exe. Make sure to use the proper URL for the originUri parameter.

After it is installed, when navigating to your webpage with the SL app installed on it, the browser will probably use the installed XAP instead of trying to download it.

Edit: If the app works fine out of browser, they can just continue to use the app out of browser without navigating to your webpage.