I have an SDK for a USB device. It includes some installer for .NET and documentation on how to use the classes. The client supposedly wants a web application that can control the USB device (using the classes provided) without installing any software… What am I supposed to do here? It seems I have to jump through a million hoops, learn a bunch of stupid technologies such as silverlight, etc, just because someone doesn’t want to download software (yet is willing to do all the things required to get the website to be able to access the USB device???).
What is the quickest way to get this working? Silverlight? ActiveX? WPF? Java Applets? Is there any problem using a java applet from an asp.net mvc application? What will I need to do to even get these technologies to be able to use the USB device via the API?
Seeing as browsers generally run code in a sandbox, there’s no real way to get this to work without the user approving something that is installed on their computer (unless you’re willing to find some security exploit, which will probably be patched, landing you back at square one).
Find out what they actually mean by “without installing any software” – what are their concerns about this?
IMHO if they’re asking people to plug in a USB device, then surely they can expect people to install a driver or utility software.