Question

We have a working WPF app that we are looking into running in the browser via Silverlight. The big question mark right now is; what kind of file access will we have (without jumping thought to many hoops)?

• Can we open server-side files?
• Can we open client-side files?
• Can we get change notification on files (client or server side)?
• Can we do the normal open/seek/write/append operations?

(Good link welcome as answeres)

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• This looks relevant for the client side stuff, as with the follow up/correction
• Haven’t found anything about loading file from the server.

Answer 1

1. Server Side Files : No, unless you serve them via a web service.
2. You can open files in two ways. One is isolated storage, an area that your application has, of limited size (although you can ask the user for an increase). In this you can read, write and do what you want. If you want hard disk access then you can only read, and the file must be opened from a file open dialog.
3. If you mean via a FileSystemWatcher – no, not even in isolated storage. Server side you can do what you want, obviously, because it’s not Silverlight there. You can use duplex web services so the server could notify your silverlight application when something happens like a file change.
4. In isolated storage you can do what you want. Outside of that it is read operations only and the user must choose a file from the File Open dialog.