Silverlight is, of course, great for providing a rich UI. But as it brings the power of .NET to the browser, it is interesting to consider how it can be used to enhance a web page in other ways. I've put together a quick 'Marchitecture' on doing just this...

The article and demo explains how to use a ‘headless’ Silverlight 2 solution to deliver ‘real-time’ or ‘push’ data into a browser.

HTTP is inherently a pull mechanism: make a request, receive a response - and so it is difficult to provide real-time data to an HTML page. Some of the limitations of HTTP can be overcome through the use of a long-lived HTTP connection allowing the streaming of real-time data to a client browser. This solution is an unconventional use of HTTP and may suffer from reliability problems. The following pattern describes ‘HTTP Streaming’: http://ajaxpatterns.org/HTTP_Streaming

Silverlight 2 has socket-based networking capabilities that can be used for this task in a more appropriate fashion. We could write a Silverlight UI that renders the data from the socket-based service, but we may not wish to amend an existing UI. So, if we combine the sockets capabilities with the Silverlight 2 HTML Bridge means that an existing web site can be integrated with Silverlight to provide true socket-based communication without the need to create a ‘Rich Internet Application’ UI, but still providing the ‘push’ capability.

Read the whole thing and download from here.