Unsafe support in Silverlight 5?

Silverlight 5 Release Candidate is available for download since yesterday. Interestingly enough, the RC supports P/Invoke for calling native functions. If only Silverlight could also support unsafe code, it would maybe be possible to use csipopt, my .NET interface to the IPOPT optimizer, from Silverlight...

After downloading and installing the Silverlight 5 RC Tools for VS 2010 SP1, I created a simple Silverlight 5 application project. Discouragingly, the Unsafe checkbox in the project settings is still disabled:

But at least the checkbox is there... Maybe I can manually edit the project file. In a regular C# project, unsafe support is indicated within each configuration/platform PropertyGroup using the following tag:

    <AllowUnsafeBlocks>true</AllowUnsafeBlocks>

So, let's insert the same specification in the Silverlight project file and reload the project. The unsafe checkbox is still disabled, but lo and behold, the checkbox is checked!

Next, let's see if I can add some unsafe code and build it. First, I create a button with the instructive text "Click me!". I add the following event handler for the button Click event:

unsafe private void UnsafeTestButton_Click(
    object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    int i = 5;
    SquarePtrParam(&i);
    UnsafeTestButton.Content = i;
}

The event handler in turn calls a simple unsafe method that dereferences an integer pointer and squares it:

unsafe static void SquarePtrParam(int* p)
{
    *p *= *p;
}

After calling the SquarePtrParam method, the click event handler should update the button content to the value of the squared integer. (If the code looks familiar I have copied it from MSDN:s C# reference section on unsafe.)

When I now build this "unsafe" Silverlight application, I get the encouraging prompt "Rebuild All succeeeded"!

Next question is, can the "unsafe" Silverlight application also be executed? It turns out that when I run it in-browser and click the button, I encounter a VerificationException, "Operation could destabilize the runtime", regardless of whether I run in normal or elevated trust. When I run out-of-browser, I get the same exception when running in normal trust, but when running out-of-browser and elevated trust, I can successfully go from here:

to here:

So the conclusion is that Silverlight 5 RC does provide hidden-away support for unsafe code. At this point it only seems to be executable out-of-browser in elevated trust. It will be interesting to see to what extent the unsafe support will be exposed in the official Silverlight 5 release.

Sidenote: I was also able to build the "unsafe" project with Silverlight 4. However, in this case I encountered the VerificationException in out-of-browser elevated-trust mode as well.