Silverlight is a great technology, and one thing that really makes it a treat to work with is the ease with which one can access the code inside the XAP file. Yes, this means that someone can look at your code,  SO DON’T PUT ANYTHING SECURE IN THERE! I took Jeff Blankenburg’s Click the Button contest.

So for a while I though Jeff had tricked me on that puzzle until I opened up the XAP file and looked at the source code. On the last page of the Silverlight you see this screen.

So what’s the big deal? Well, the level before it was titled “Level 10”, so I figured Jeff was trying to pull a fast one and there was more to this seemingly innocent page. So I tried to find how to get beyond this level 12 to the real one. I eventually took the smart route, and I opened .NET Reflector and pointed it at the DLL file for the contest.

How did I do that you ask? Here are some quick steps for looking at the source code of a Silverlight application.

Step 1: Download the .xap file. View the source of the HTML page or look at the NET tab in FireBug to get the .xap file and download it.

Step 2: Rename the file to .zip and open it. Yes, a .xap is really a .zip neat huh?

Step 3: Unzip the file and find the dll you’re looking for. In my case it is called “ClickTheButton.dll”

Step 4: Open up .NET Reflector and open up that dll file.

Step 5: After examining the dll you’ll be able to see all of the code. In this case I can see that Jeff actually has 13 levels he created for this application.

You now have a choice to make. You can ask Jeff Blankenburg what happened to the other puzzles or just go and take a look at the code and see which levels are missing.