Silverlight application not working on IIS 6.0

We have a web product which is used by different clients. This is running perfectly fine when the Web server is IIS 7. I started facing issues when I installed this for a client on IIS 6. Wherever we had Silverlight, we are seeing a blank white screen. Since the siverlight application has some web service calls, I was thinking some of these web service calls are failing or hanging. I started narrowing down the issues by excluding each web serices call, but no luck.

I used HttpWatchBasic (free) tool and realized that my Silverlight file (.xap) is not getting honored. I created a hello world application and deployed in on the IIS 6 server and realized that also not getting honored. From the HttpWatchBasic result, it was showing clearly the application is not downloading the silverlight file. But in reality it was not able to serve the request due to lack of mime types in IIS 6. Since IIS 6 was released prior to Silverlight and we need to configure our web server to support it by adding the proper MIME type.

All MIME types needed to support Silverlight are implemented by default in IIS 7 in Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows 7. Other customers can add MIME types by running IIS Manager, clicking MIME Types, then clicking Add, and then adding the following MIME types:

  • .xap application/x-silverlight-app
  • .xaml application/xaml+xml
  • .xbap application/x-ms-xbap

IIS 7 Screenshot

IIS 6 Screenshot

  • Right click on the IIS Main branch and click on properties.
  • Click on the MIME Types button on the Properties Screen. This will open a new dialog with all the registered MIME Types.
  • Click on the New button to add the MIME Type. According to Microsoft we need to have the following types
  • Once we say OK the newly added MIME types will get added to the list as shown above

	.xap     application/x-silverlight-app
	.xaml    application/xaml+xml
	.xbap    application/x-ms-xbap

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