Exploring the Initial Silverlight Project Structure

Going back to our solution structure in Visual Studio, let's now see what it took to get this amount of application functionality and explore a Silverlight project. Figure 1-7 shows the structure of the default solution in the Solution Explorer window created from the Silverlight Business Application project template.

As you can see, the project template has created a sizeable solution structure, containing two projects—a Silverlight project and a Web Application project. Note that the web project is the startup project in the solution—not the Silverlight application (this was touched on earlier). The web page hosting our application is requested by the client, which the browser reads, then downloads and runs the Silverlight application. The Silverlight project is linked to the web project in the solution to support this process. Because the client needs to download the application from the web site, the compiled Silverlight application must be available for download from an accessible location within the site. By default, this location is the ClientBin folder. If you expand this folder (after the solution has been compiled for the first time), you'll find the Silverlight application (a XAP file). XAP files are discussed later in this chapter.