Fingerprint Reader

Question

Is there a way to access a fingerprint reader from a silverlight and/or ASP.NET application? I have a web application that I'd like to implement fingerprint scanning in. Is this possible in Silverlight or ASP.NET?

Answer 1

May require some Active-X or browser integration if the vendor provides it , but as a simple way very hard to find a solution.Go for digital signature (esignature),private key signing or SSO solutions.

Answer 2

In Europe, or if you have EU customers, you probably have to make sure that data is adequately protected, and needed.

Answer 3

The short answer is no, you're probably not going to be able to make it work. Silverlight doesn't natively provide support for this sort of thing, and the mechanisms for breaking out of Silverlight's browser sandbox are complicated and unwieldy. That said, I can think of three ways to do it, but they would all require either tremendous luck, or a significant amount of work.

Option #1: If the vendor (or someone else) provides an ActiveX or COM interface to the fingerprint scanner, it would be possible to access it through Silverlight 4's Out-of-Browser COM support, as described, say, here. But of course, this would require running the application out-of-browser, and in full-trust mode.

Option #2: If you or the application vendor exposed the fingerprint scanner through a scriptable ActiveX interface, so that you could call that interface from JavaScript, you could wrap that interface in some JavaScript methods, and call those methods from Silverlight using Silverlight's HTML bridge.

Option #3: You could, in theory, write a wrapper around your fingerprint scanner, and expose a sockets or WCF interface. You could then call that interface from Silverlight.

The big problem with all of these is that you're likely to have to install some software locally, which is a significant point of friction for most web application users.

Answer 4

Depending on when you need this for you might take a look at SL4. In trusted mode there is access to both printers and scanners. I suspect that creating / accessing a library for a finger print scanner wouldn't be too hard.

HTH, Mark