Silverlight 4, Out of browser, Printing, Automatic updates

Question

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.

1. Gives clients the feel that it is a cloud based solution.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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:

1. 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?
2. 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?

Answer 1

Autocomplete is not something that can only be done in Silverlight. Your ClickOnce app is already out-of-browser. And printing via raw bytes to a thermal printer is something that would not be easily engineered in Silverlight.

Not trying to sound negative, but in sum it sounds like you're better off simply working on enhancing the app that you already have.

Answer 2

1. Printing -- using the PrintDocument API your user will be prompted for a print dialog. Currently using that API there is no way to suppress this. It isn't ideal for high-volume thermal situations (like pharmacies, shipping warehouses, etc.). You could use the trusted application mode and peek out into COM and do whatever you want with the printer.

2. The update happens when the application asks for it. There is an API to use and, once called, if an update exists it is downloaded -- no prompt to the user as an option. If an update is found you can alert the user to restart or that on the next restart they will have the updated application.