Silverlight issue on Chrome with empty InitParams

Just a quick note to hopefully stop anybody wasting time (like I did) on this.

In a Silverlight application we are developing we have implemented a provider model to get provider specific InitParams values passed in. When implementing a new provider and manually testing using my default browser (which today happened to be Chrome), I was presented with the “To view this content, please install” Silverlight click now to install splash! Bummer.

I knew it was provider specific, and to be honest immediately suspected the InitParams as the provider itself did nothing!

To verify I created a new Silverlight project in VS2010, and added an empty InitParams param element like this:

<param name="InitParams" value="" />

running this up in Chrome showed the issue, run in IE8 and its fine; add a value to the InitParams such as:

<param name="InitParams" value="test=test" />

and it works. I haven’t tried other browsers.