C H A P T E R  16

Interacting with the Host Operating System

Although Silverlight started as a sandboxed platform that ran only within a web browser window, it's grown to become a mature platform for building applications that inevitably required a certain level of integration and interaction with the host operating system.

With the introduction of Silverlight 3, we gained the ability to run a Silverlight application outside the browser in its own window, launching it from an icon on the desktop or the start menu, and using it in much the same way as a standard (native) application. Silverlight 4 enabled developers to request elevated trust permissions to gain direct access to the file system and COM for applications that ran outside the browser, permitting applications to have a closer relationship with the host operating system and enabling a whole range of new capabilities and possibilities for your applications. Silverlight 5 took things one step further by enabling Silverlight applications to run inside the browser with elevated trust and added support for P/Invoke calls and multiple out-of-browser windows. These features enable you to build more powerful and functional applications in Silverlight.

In this chapter, we'll look at how you can configure your Silverlight application to run outside the browser and interact with the host operating system.