Silverlight 4 “Pop-out” window application project

I just added a new project up that’s not so much a full-fledged project but just a demo application showcasing the use of some tricks to be able to show a separate window in Silverlight 4 RC (and, most importantly, communicate with that window). As you know ChildWindow is great and all in SL4 but it’s still not an actual separate window so it’s constrained to the current Silverlight application. Using the code in my example project, you can actually create a new window which is actually a separate instance of the same Silverlight 4 RC application. These 2 windows (or more?) communicate with each other using LocalMessageSender\Receiver and everyone’s happy. It requires trusted OOB and executes a Shell command but so there’s always gotchas but if you’re working with this type of Silverlight 4 RC application, then you might find this implementation helpful.

There’s a plethora of ways to use this functionality from a simple “popup” window implementation (if you’re not happy with ChildWindow) to a full blown multiple-instance application execution. Although the amount of data is limited, the 2 applications can communicate on several different data paths to allow full transferability between the two… and it’s all client-side so you’re not bogging down the web server sending messages all the way from one instance to the other instance.

Anyway, pretty neat stuff so go here to check it out and get more details.