Programmer Payback

Silverlight apps are nothing more than big zip files and Amazon S3 is dirt cheap and hyper-scalable. Why would you ever host your Silverlight .xap files on your own server or ISP? … especially with Silverlight Streaming being dropped soon.

Here’s a quick guide to putting your Silverlight apps on Amazon S3 and depending on your app, never worry about scalability or bandwidth costs again…

1) Create your Amazon S3 account.

2) Install S3 Organizer FireFox plugin (this is the equivelent of an FTP client for Amazon S3).

3) Run S3 Organizer, log into your account and create your bucket.

4) Upload your xap file to your bucket. BUT… you must add custom headers unless you are also going to host your .html file there too. Silverlight xaps need a MIME type specified when they are loaded from another domain. The good news is, this is easy with S3 as long as you do it at the time that you upload the file. There is probably a way to set it after the fact but not with S3 Organizer.

Simply set the content type to ‘application/x-silverlight-app’ and send up your xap. Don’t forget to do this EVERY time you upload an update.

5) After uploading your .xap file, set permissions so everyone can read your xap file. Right click on your newly uploaded xap file and choose “Edit ACL…”. Then check Read access for Everyone and Authenticated Users. You do NOT need to do this every time as S3 remembers your ACL settings.

6) Add the enableHtmlAccess param to your object tag within your html file to enable access to the DOM bridge (assuming your Silverlight app needs access to the DOM bridge).

For example:

7) Change your html page to load your xap file from S3 directly by setting the source param in your object tag.

For example:

Note: ‘mybucket’ is the name of your bucket on S3.

8 ) Upload your html (or aspx) page to your web server. GoDaddy.com offers cheap hosting for only $5 per month.

That’s it! At this point, the only scalability concerns you should have are those of your web services (assuming you call web services from your Silverlight app).

And with S3, the costs depend on the usage — which will literally cost you just pennies per month until you have some descent traffic. Do the math and you’ll see that it would only cost 17 cents to have a  300K .xap get hit 3500 times. At that rate you’d pay ~$48 to have 1 million new users per month. (I say “new” users because unless you update your xap, users should be caching your xap file and won’t need to re-download it).

Happy cheap hosting and Silverlight coding!