How does Silverlight fit into a ‘proper’ UI architecture such as MVC?

With Microsoft releasing a whole caboodle of new tools as part of VS2008 and .net 3.5 I thought it would be fun sensible to spend some time trying to figure them out and having a play. I also thought that I would spend some time playing about with some UI tools/best practices that I had heard about but never used (such as MVC and Monorail).

My grand idea is to create a system to act as a Video File Organiser, I have some initial thoughts about what I want it to do, but the main reason to do it is to play with the tools.

I want to create a Silverlight UI, working in a proper MVC architecture that uses an Astoria web data service to query the library. At some point I’ll also think about how I would like to populate the library with video files on the server.

Problem 1 - Silverlight with MVC

Granted, Silverlight looks fantastic, but I haven’t been able to find much about how to combine it with proper architectural best practice. What I would like to do is figure out MVC and Silverlight at the same time, and see if it makes sense to use Silverlight as the View.  This is all just guesswork at the moment, and my first task is to try and familiarise myself with the basics of these technologies before I start trying to combine them in weird and wonderful ways.

I assume I could ‘do’ MVC from scratch, but I wonder if it would be possible to use a framework such as Monorail? Monorail doesn’t seem to have any mentions of Silverlight, so might have to figure this one out by myself. It seems that Silverlight would make sense in one of two places -

1. Create a new Monorail view engine for silverlight - this would somehow create the silverlight markup…
2. Use an existing view engine – not sure what view engines really are, but could NVelocity create Silverlight already if you specify the appropriate template?

Either way, how do you connect the controller to the silverlight generated…. hmmm

Dear reader, I will report back once I have investigated.