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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T22:21:05+00:00

I’m currently trying to determine the available disk space from my Silverlight application. My

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I’m currently trying to determine the available disk space from my Silverlight application.

My app can download a lot of data (video files) and obviously, this can fail if the disk space isn’t there.
I know I can catch exceptions on writes, but that will not lead to a very user-friendly experience, because the information will come too late and cause useless waits.

In regular .NET, I would be using DriveInfo (see How do I retrieve disk information in C#? for an example), but that class isn’t present as of Silverlight 5, even in elevated trust mode.

So, is there a way to determine the available space on a drive in Silverlight?

Update:

  • I’m fine with requiring Elevated Priviledges for my application.
  • I’m also fine with Silverlight 5 only solutions.
  • I need something that works on both Windows and Mac OS, so PInvoke/COM interop is not an option.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m adding my answer here to sum up my discoveries:

    TL/DR: there is no easy way to get available disk space in Silverlight 5 that is cross-platform (Windows/Mac OS).

    • You can’t get available disk space with standard Silverlight calls. DriveInfo is missing from Silverlight 5, elevated privileges don’t come into account here.
    • Quota is useless for that kind of issue, it doesn’t take into account available disk space.
    • There are workarounds for Windows only, requiring elevated trust, using P/Invoke into Win32.
    • For a detailed support of filesystem, see this article: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/FileExplorerInSilverlight.aspx
    • Fall-back is to check for exceptions when writing files and present the user with a message at the time of writing. People have also suggested pre-writing the file when the download start to ensure sufficient disk space.
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