Silverlight custom fill screen causes white screen of death

Question

I am developing a Silverlight 4 application, and I created a special splash screen. At first glance, the custom splash screen worked well - very well. After a few days, I began to notice that the screen saver would no longer be displayed and the screen would remain blank. This only happens when I open several IE tabs / windows pointing to the same application. The first few will load perfectly, and the next tabs / windows will remain “white” - as if nothing was / were not loaded. This does not seem to be a problem with other browsers that I tested (e.g. Firefox and Chrome). Unfortunately, this product requires opening several screens (and I will not require our users to use a non-Microsoft Internet browser). In addition, we have another product that hosts this Silverlight application inside the WPF WebBrowser control (which is similar to IE - and has the same problems as above). Does anyone have any ideas on how to get around this? This is becoming more and more disappointing.

I should also point out that the default splash screen seems to avoid these problems. When I delete a custom splash screen, we no longer see these problems.

ANY help will be greatly appreciated!

-Tom

Answer 1

The first diagnosis is to use a really simple static custom splash, such as a simple red rectangle. If this works fine, does custom splash use other resources from your website, such as images? If so, make sure the cache is correct.

Answer 2

I also came across this. IE7 compatibility mode is still enabled on our site, and I'm using IE9. When I use the developer toolbar and change the document mode to IE9, I cannot get it to repeat. It also works great if browser mode is compatible with IE7 or IE8 and IE7.

I will not use Splash Screens until we move on to removing IE7 compatibility mode, which is the task we have planned for the future.

EDIT: It turns out that compatibility mode may not have been the full answer. I found this forum post that suggests including a pop-up screen in a string. It seems to work 100%. I used UserControl in ASP.Net to insert it. They also have a link to a Microsoft Connect error report that has been closed as not reproducible. Maybe a few more voices will force them to open it again?