Don’t forget to map the xap!

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Was just updating one of my sites to the latest release of Graffiti CMS, in order to take advantage of Kevin Harder’s updated Slide.Show2 plug-in, using Silverlight 2, when I found that the site that worked perfectly on my local machine would no longer display photos when I pushed it out to my production server. D’oh!

Fortunately, a commenter on Kevin’s site pointed to this article, which explains how to map the .xap extension used by zipped Silverlight 2 apps to the correct MIME type (application/x-silverlight-app) in IIS.

Jumped on the hoster’s control panel, added the MIME type mapping, and voila…working gallery:

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Note that mapping the MIME type may not be required for all servers (Windows Server 2008, for example, should be good to go out of the box), but if you’re faced with a blank Silverlight area, give it a shot.