Desklighter Update: Beta 2 with more customization options

The latest version of the Desklighter tool is now available for free download from IdentityMine Blendables Labs: http://blendables.com/labs/Desklighter/Default.aspx

 

“Desklighter is a windows utility that creates standalone windows applications from Silverlight xap files. Desklighter helps you in sharing your Silverlight applications as independent executables without having to worry about the hosting infrastructure. Unlike Silverlight Out-of-Browser(OOB) applications that run only on the installed computer, executables created by Desklighter are truly portable.”

See some sample games and demos created using Desklighter at http://sites.google.com/site/silverlightoffline

This new version of Desklighter has a settings panel providing more options to customize the executable application window. The settings available are Height and Width to control default application window size, border type (Re-sizable, fixed, none), application icon, background color, and window title. If the Silverlight application is expecting initial parameters, that can be supplied as well. It also supports transparency and it is possible to create custom shaped Silverlight standalone applications by setting the Background as 'Transparent' and choosing the 'No Border' option.

The recently released Silverlight 3.0 Out-of-Browser (OOB) feature opens up a lot of new scenarios as explained by Ashish Shetty. It surely is a great feature and will evolve to provide more options with upcoming releases of Silverlight. But it doesn’t help you in making your application portable. OOB helps in storing a hosted Silverlight application onto your desktop for running it from outside the browser. These applications will run only from the systems where they were installed.

However, applications created using Desklighter can be copied to another computer and it will work from it without any issues. If the computer doesn’t have Silverlight installed, the application will show a banner (default ‘No Silverlight’ experience) prompting the user to download and install the Silverlight plug-in.

Note that Desklighter is best suited for making already existing self contained Silverlight applications (where all the dependent resources are available within the xap file) portable. Examples include games, demos, proof-of-concepts, presentations, electronic brochures, tools and utilities.