Silverlight Streaming and Google Analytics

I can’t seem to find a way to implement page/event tracking from Silverlight using Google Analytics when hosted using Silverlight Streaming. The usual solution to do this with with a regular Silverlight app is to reference the Google Analytics ga.js script and call HtmlPage.Window.Invoke() from Silverlight. But a difficulty arises because that javascript is executed in the context of the Silverlight application, which (in my case at least) is inside an iframe, and therefore can’t use the ga.js script.

One of the features available with creating a Silverlight Streaming application is to include javascript files with your Silverlight app so that you can use them from Silverlight, but ga.js isn’t my script so I can’t do that. Unless I downloaded the obfuscated version using Firebug or something… but… ugh!

I’m sure there will be some combination of HtmlPage.Window.Parent.Parent.Whatever I can use to do what I want to do, but I’m already into my second glass of wine for the evening and my brains starting to go on holiday. Any UK devs just waking up want to tackle this problem?

I guess you could simulate the issue yourself by adding a new .html page to your standard Silverlight hosting website containing an iframe with loads the Silverlight test page. In fact that’s how I’ll start tackling it tomorrow.

For now, I’m going to call it a night.

I see I’m getting a little bit of new traffic/twitter follows which I guess I can attribute to my new website… not because I think it’s brilliant but because there aren’t many actual cases of websites making use of Silverlight Streaming, so the Silverlight enthusiasts on Twitter seem to be retweeting. Maybe I’m wrong but if I’m right, thanks everyone, and please provide feedback about what I’ve made. I’ll be really pleased to hear from you.

Providing custom ‘no-Silverlight’ UI using Silverlight Streaming

When building and hosting your own Silverlight application it’s pretty simple to provide whatever custom UI you want when a user doesn’t have a required version of Silverlight installed. Refer to Tim Heuer’s article on the subject: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/03/25/creating-a-great-silverlight-deployment-experience.aspx.

When using Silverlight Streaming, however, it’s not that simple. The two methods provided for embedding your Silverlight application don’t provide a neat space to put your own HTML so you can’t easily ‘own’ the experience.  In my case I used the iFrame solution because I couldn’t get the other method to work straight away.

What I did to get around this was to download the latest Silverlight.js from here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightjs, and the latest JQuery from here: http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery#Current_Release.

Reference both scripts from your web page and then add the following script:

$(document).ready(function() {

if (Silverlight.isInstalled(‘2.0.30226.2′) == true) {

showSilverlight();

}

else {

showCopy();

}

});

$(document).ready(function() {
    if (Silverlight.isInstalled('2.0.30226.2') == true) {
        showSilverlight(); // function to display the iframe & hide the default copy
    }
    else {
        showCopy(); // function to hide the iframe & show the default copy
    }
});

And that’s it!

Note: there’s a comment on the silverlight.js download page that the script links to an older version of the silverlight player. It seems to be correct but even when I updated my script file I still got the ‘older version of Silverlight’ message when using Chrome. Also I don’t know yet whether the experience works on a Mac – if anyone can let me know I’d really appreciate it!