So I finally get the opportunity to learn and develop some Silverllight applications. After seeing some more examples and hearing about it more in my IT circle of friends via blogs, twitter, user group meetings, etc., I actually feel much better about my journey and am confident I can learn it well this time.
My brother Sebastian and I deployed our first Silverlight application to a production server last night. What worked great on Sebastian's local machine resulted to a blank screen on production. When we right clicked on the screen, we had a popup menu with the option of "Silverlight", so it appeared to work. Upon further review, there was a hidden javascript error that detailed as follows:
"Error: Sys.InvalidOperationException: InitializeError error #2104 in control 'Xaml1".
A Google search returned a few websites that talked about "mime types"; I almost dismissed them, but then Sebastian remembered having the same kind of problems with Flash that adding mime types fixed, as well. Afterwards, my troubleshooting lead me to the following post on how to fix it:
http://www.bloggix.com/blogs/microsoft/archive/2008/12/10/error-2104-could-not-download-the-silverlight-application.aspx
In summary, there are two mime types that have to be added to your web properties in IIS under the "HTTP Headers" tab via the "Mime Types" button. This is a screenshot of the Mime Types dialog box and the two I added: .XAML and .XAP:
This indeed solved the problem, and we were at last successful in deploying our Silverlight application on production.