Question

I am wondering what would be the best/preferred way to write a scanning app that lives in a web browser. The basic idea is I want to use a web page from where I can click a button which will scan a document on the client and upload that document to server. The first thought that came to mind is write a native (C++?) browser plug-in. However, I don’t know what is required for a native plug-in to be cross-browsers. So here are few questions:

1. Is Silverlight a viable option? This is what I would prefer since all my code is C#, ASP.NET. The question is – can Silverlight talk to Windows Image Acquisition COM on the client?

2. Write something in flash, may be using Flex? Is this a viable option? Can it talk to WIA COM on the client?

3. And finally, if the answer is writing it in C++ then what are some of the high-level gotchas to make it cross-browser?

4. What else is out there?

Answer 1

Check out this:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightwia