When I'm at home, I don't have access to high-end hosting products like dedicated servers and VPS, so I'm stuck with a shared hosting plan for my personal sites. Maybe Azure will make running a virtual environment in the cloud more accessible - and I hear Amazon EC2 is now offering Windows environments - but for the time being I am happy enough with things as they are.
I have noticed, however, that there's very little literature on how to set up IIS6 to run Silverlight when you don't have RDP access, but are limited to a control panel system. My hosting provider gives me PLESK, so that's what I'm looking at.
There are two basic steps for setting up IIS6 to run Silverlight (IIS 7 does all this out of the box I believe)
- Ensure that ClientBin directory is configured to run scripts
- Ensure that IIS6 understands what to do with XAP files\
Here's the process:
1. From the root of you domain or subdomain, click "Web Directories"
2. Click "Add New Virtual Directory"
3. Ensure scripts have Execute permissions. I also added write permission, but only do this if you need to.
4. Once the ClientBin directory is created and you are within it, click on MIME types.
5. Add the following MIME types:
- .xaml application/xaml+xml
- .xap application/x-silverlight-app
- .xbap application/x-ms-xbap
6. You should see this:
And that's that. Your crappy shared server is setup to run Silverlight.