Is there a way to make a desktop application easily interfaceable via Web ? Meaning, can you have a way to interface with a single desktop application as if you were remote desktop'd into the machine but not? I am looking at doing this in ASP.NET or Silverlight.
A:
I'm not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for...
If you were able to create your entire application UI in Silverlight and host it properly (in IIS or whatever) it would then be accessible from anywhere on the web. If you needed the perception of a real desktop app when running locally, you could then just make some simple app (WinForms, WPF, whatever) which contains a web browser control that could also load up the hosted Silverlight app (and just be a transparent browser). Depending on what the application is doing, you would obviously need some sort of service layer (probably in WCF) do to all of the heavy lifting and data access.
I guess the main question would be: can you accomplish everything your application needs to do in Silverlight? Since Silverlight is meant to run in a browser, it can be very limiting.
Dan Auclair
2010-06-17 15:33:48
I guess I didn't explain my question well... Basically I want to take an existing app, encapsulate it, and make it web interfaceable - if that is even possible.
yeungling
2010-06-17 21:59:11
A:
There are many solutions based on plugins. Some of the popular ones:
If you're ok with plugins, but only if they're common ones (flash, java), there are various solutions:
- http://www.wizhelp.com/flashlight-vnc/
- http://www.tightvnc.com/doc/java/README.txt (bundled java applet with TightVNC)
If you don't want plugins at all, there's an experimental HTML5/javascript VNC viewer:
Joeri Sebrechts
2010-07-27 10:17:13