Question

I am working on an intranet app where it needs to collect system information from environment variable information from the client machine so it can be used in later processing by the server. The browser is Internet Explorer, versions 8 and 9.

I looked at Silverlight as a possibility but it appears to be too constrained (for security reasons) to be able to get at the information I need to collect.

So far, searching for an answer hasn’t yielded anything yet. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

I don’t think one can read environment variables from within browsers. Since browsers are designed for the Internet, providing them with an ability to read system’s settings of any kind would lead to security issues. Nobody wants a website he/she visiting on the Internet reading his system information right ? I am very skeptical about the possibility of doing the thing you are trying to achieve. However, you might consider writing a sample windows based app, that gets downloaded from your intranet website, reads the environment settings and submits to the server.