Richard J Green

Offline Installation of Silverlight 3.0 Runtime

Whilst working on the DVD for our wedding to ship out to everyone (yes, I know it was a long time ago), I’ve been trying to work out how to build an offline installer for Silverlight onto the disc.

The reason being I am shipping this DVD out to people all over the place and some of which I can’t guarantee a stable or fast network connection to download Silverlight.

Whilst looking around on the blogosphere for information about offline installations for Silverlight, I have across this posting by Tim Heuer at http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/09/29/install-silverlight-2-rc0-offline.aspx.

Whilst helpful, this article is targeted squarely at developers – Not me in this case, so I had to find my own solution, but Tim was of some help.

Step One is to download the Silverlight Development Runtime from Microsoft.

Once downloaded extract the contents of the runtime to a folder. I use WinRAR to do this, but that part is up to you.

You will now have a directory which contains the following files:

If you run the intall.exe file this will start the Silverlight 3 for Developers installer however do not be fooled.
If you check Programs and Features (Add or Remove Programs for XP lovers) after the install is done, nothing is actually mentioned about developers. This simply installs the Silverlight 3 Runtime.

If you are looking for something a bit more fancy then you could do a silent install using install.exe /q which also works.

For GPO installers out there the silverlight.msi is actually an empty container and will show Silverlight in the Programs and Features list but presents a 0 KB installation size and 0.0.0.0 version number. You need to chain the silverlight.msp file which is within the silverlight.7z file to the end of the install to actually install the Silverlight Runtime.

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