SilverLight 2.0 Beta 1 Relative Uri problem

Yay! My first real SilverLight post :)

Anyway, the problem is with controls in SilverLight that expect an URI as a parameter. It doesn't work. After trying all kind of stuff and googling a litle I found out that

1. the path is relative to the web application ClientBin directory
2. the path cannot contain .. or other directory/URI navigation markers like ~
3. the SilverLight control does not have access to a Request object like a web page does

This link already discusses it: Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Uri inconsistency, but I also have an additional solution to the ones listed there.

Here are the solutions for this:

• Provide an absolute Uri either statically or by generating it with this piece of code:

  New Uri(Application.Current.Host.Source.AbsolutePath + "../../../video.wmv", UriKind.Absolute)

• Copy the images, videos, files into the ClientBin directory then only provide their name
• Create virtual directories inside ClientBin that point to your resource directories. For example create a virtual directory Videos that points to the ~/Resources/Videos folder in the site, then simply use Videos/video.wmv as the URI

Of these three, the last I find the most elegant, even if the setup of the website itself might be rendered a lot more difficult by this.