• How To: Integrate a Prism v2 application with the Silverlight 3 Navigation Framework
• Silverlight 3 Navigation: Navigating to Pages in dynamically-loaded assemblies

The Silverlight team is aware of the limitations mentioned below, so they might be taken into account for a future version.

Issue Description

Pages with code behind, from remotely loaded modules cannot be navigated to, calling the Frame’s Navigate method. This prevents having functional views since they neither have code behind nor a ViewModel attached.

Cause of Issue

The Silverlight 3 Navigation framework goes over every AssemblyPart in the Deployment.Current.Parts collection if the Page to navigate to has code behind, as shown in the code below (PageResourceContentLoader class reflected code in the System.Windows.Navigation namespace from the System.Windows.Controls.Navigation assembly):

private static Type GetTypeFromAnyLoadedAssembly(string typeName)
        {
            Type type = null;
            foreach (AssemblyPart part in Deployment.Current.Parts)
            {
                /*THE LINE BELOW RETURNS NULL FOR REMOTELY LOADED ASSEMBLIES, BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT IN THE APPLICATION'S XAP*/
                StreamResourceInfo resourceStream = Application.GetResourceStream(new Uri(part.Source, UriKind.Relative));
                if (resourceStream != null)
                {
                    Assembly assembly = new AssemblyPart().Load(resourceStream.Stream);
                    if (assembly != null)
                    {
                        type = Type.GetType(typeName + "," + assembly, false);
                    }
                }
                if (type != null)
                {
                    return type;
                }
            }
            return type;
        }

As the above code shows, even if the AssemblyPart is in the collection it is not found by the Application.GetReourceStream method. From the method’s MSDN site, the cause is:

“The GetResourceStream method allows you to load an arbitrary resource file from one of the following locations:

• Embedded in the application assembly in the application package.
• Embedded in a library assembly that is included in the application package.
• Included in the application package.”

So only assemblies in the application’s original .xap file are found and not for other modules.

I hope the above explanation was useful.