Summary

Silverlight provides a number of ways to interact with the host operating system, providing read and write access to isolated storage, files, and the clipboard; installing on the machine and running in a similar fashion to a standard, native application, and even breaking out of its sandbox to run with
elevated trust permissions.

By enabling Silverlight applications to break out of the sandbox, particularly with COM support, a wide range of new possibilities is opened up to applications. These possibilities narrow the gap between what is and isn't possible to achieve in Silverlight and WPF and enable Silverlight to be considered for a wider range of development projects.