What is the Downloader object and what can it do?

This is one of the first questions I ran into while exploring Silverlight.  This object will retrieve objects (images, video, xaml) asynchronously, much like AJAX.  There is a gaping limitation being that it cannot go cross domain. 

To get around this take a look at Peter Kellner’s article below.  He develops a web service to go cross domain to get images, then his Silverlight application calls the web service running on the same machine.

An interesting feature of the Downloader object is the ability to get XAML asynchronously.  This gives us the ability to create module Silverlight applications and code XAML Plug-ins.

Links:
For more information see the MSDN page Using a Downloader Objectin Silverlight 1.0
Peter Kellner’s use of the Downloder object to get images (http://peterkellner.net/2007/07/03/silverlightdownloader/)