Silverlight 4, Out of browser, Printing, Automatic updates
- by minal
I have a very critial business application presently running using Winforms.
The application is a very core UI shell. It accepts input data, calls a webservice on my server to do the computation, displays the results on the winforms app and finally send a print stream to the printer.
Presently the application is deployed using Click-once.
Moving forward, I am trying to contemplate wheather I should move the application into a Silverlight application. Couple of reasons I am thinking silverlight.
Gives clients the feel that it is a cloud based solution.
Can be accessed from any PC. While the clickonce app is able to do this as well, they have to install an app, and when updates are available they have to click "Yes" to update.
The application presently has a drop down list of customers, this list has expanded to over 3000 records. Scrolling through the list is very painful. With Silverlight I am thinking of the auto complete ability.
Out of the browser - this will be handy for those users who use the app daily.
I haven't used Silverlight previous hence looking for some expert advice on a few things:
Printing - does silverlight allow sending raw print data to the printer. The application prints to a Zebra Thermal label printer. I have to send raw bytes to the printer with the commands. Can this be done with SL, or will it always prompt the "Print" dialog?
Out of browser - when SL apps are installed as out of browser, how to updates come through, does the app update automatically or is the user prompted to opt for update?
