The Silverlight 2 converter below will convert from a string to a absolute uri in order to stream the images from the website instead of retrieving them from the XAP file.

One of the reasons to do this was a side-effect in Silverlight. For example, when you have a folder within your silverlight project named 'Controls', and you bind an image path to 'Images/Test.png', the resulting image will be loaded from 'Controls/Images/Test'. To overcome this behaviour, I trim the folder name from the request path and transform the relative images to an absolute url.

Here's the code:

[code]

using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Data;
using System.Windows.Media.Imaging;
using System.Windows.Interop;

namespace Silverlight.Controls.Converters
{
    /// <summary>  
    /// A type converter for changing any image url to the root of the web application
    /// </summary>  
    public class ImageSourceConverter : IValueConverter
    {
        public object Convert(
            object value,
            Type targetType,
            object parameter,
            CultureInfo culture)
        {
            Uri hostUri = Application.Current.Host.Source;

            //first, get the host,
            string host = hostUri.GetComponents(UriComponents.SchemeAndServer, UriFormat.UriEscaped);

            string path = hostUri.GetComponents(UriComponents.PathAndQuery, UriFormat.UriEscaped);

            //remove /clientbin/...
            path = path.Substring(0, path.IndexOf("/ClientBin"));
            path = System.IO.Path.Combine(path, (string)value);

            //now combine host and path.
            Uri newUri = new Uri(new Uri(host), path);

            return new BitmapImage(newUri);
        }

        public object ConvertBack(
            object value,
            Type targetType,
            object parameter,
            CultureInfo culture)
        {
            throw new NotSupportedException();
        }
    }
}

[/code]