Hosting Microsoft Office application inside Silverlight 4?

Question

I know that Silverlight 4 has support for COM interop via the AutomationFactory class.

dynamic excel = AutomationFactory.CreateObject( "Excel.Application" );
excel.Visible = true;

But this creates a separate window for the COM object. What I am missing here is if I am actually able to actually host an Office document inside my Silverlight application - in a ContentPresenter for example?

Answer 1

You're not missing anything - it can't be done. You could look for converters to Silverlight of Office documents like

• TextGlow for Word (source is on CodePlex) (2007 [and maybe 2010] format only).
• PowerPoint to Silverlight Convertor (client side conversion, requires PowerPoint to be installed), also on CodePlex.

Both of these are view-only and do not come close to full fidelity - but they are a "good enough" set of options.