The application that we'll build in this article will allow you to enter a Twitter search term, and display the tweets received in Silverlight. Unfortunately, this process isn't as simple as loading a URL from Silverlight, because of something known as cross-domain access policy.

He talks some about the problem that this cross-domain access can cause for your scripts and how he used PHP to solve it. He created a simple web service that his Silverlight application could query in the same domain. This service did the call to Twitter and returned back the results to the waiting Silverlight app.

You might think that it would be more difficult to use Silverlight in a PHP application, but it's actually quite simple; you can leverage JSON, XML, or any number of communication technologies to pass data from Silverlight to the PHP backend. However, in this article, we're choosing to go with a SOAP Web Service. I'll first show you how to start developing with Silverlight, then cover how you set up the web service in PHP, and finally demonstrate how to access the service from your Silverlight application.

You'll also need to have the Silverlight Tools and Visual Studio installed as well to be able to follow along. He walks you through the creation of a sample project, setting up the basic Silverlight app, making a WSDL for the SOAP service and making the sample web service with PHP's built-in SOAP functionality. With that in place, he shows how to consume the service with the C# frontend and how to send a sample message back out to the application.

I'd planned on diving into the Embedding Silverlight in PHP project, but what I found is that there have been some changes in Microsoft technologies since the release of that project that make it even easier to embed Silverlight in PHP applications. So I'll stick to the spirit of my promise if not to the letter of it.

He shows how to set up some storage (a blob) on the Windows Azure service as a place to keep the video you're going to stream. When you set it up you'll create a public service name and get an access key that you can use when accessing the videos. He includes an example of the upload process and how, based on the information for each video, you can use this project to pull video directly from this data store.

This session covers the basics of Microsoft Silverlight and demonstrates how PHP developers can benefit from developing rich client-side components that run in the web browser using Silverlight and PHP.

You can either listen to this latest episode via their in-page player or get the mp3 directly.

Only on rare cases applications created with Silverlight (or Flash) are static - it's very common to have information coming from a RSS feed, REST service or any other data source. What is more important, these applications usually needs configuration variables (user name, language, products category, etc.) to be passed to them. But how to do all that?

He shows how to create a simple configuration that can be read by Silverlight and used to pass information back into your PHP script. There's even a more asynchronous method that lets your messaging work a lot like Ajax.

Despite speculation that Microsoft would make an announcement around its Silverlight runtime environment at last month's fourth annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (ZendCon) in Santa Clara, Calif., the company kept a relatively low profile.

They do mention the collaboration that Zend and Microsoft have already done and note that going forward there will be more initiative to get Windows and PHP to work even better for desktop applications.

Shortly Silverlight is a cross-browser platform that can be used for developing client-side components that run in the web browser and contain rich media, graphics and can interactively communicate with the user. The language that can be used for writing Silverlight code can be in general any .NET language, so our goal is to allow using PHP by making Phalanger compatible with Silverlight.

He has two demo applications - a simple car app and a helicopter game - he uses as examples. He focuses on the simpler of the two, the car demo, and gives the XAML source, the code for the PHPX file and talks some about the method of deployment that'd need to be used to get the app out to others.

You can download the complete source for the examples (including the Phalanger Silverlight runtime) as well.