Siliverlight 4 has a few features Chris highlighted during the Silverlight 4 launch keynote that I wanted to expand on as well as a few others that he didn’t demo that we’re trying out. We may not make use of all of them in the LabVIEW UI Builder but they do present some interesting possibilities. One features I wanted to write about today is the Out of Browser feature and ability to run trusted applications. The Web UI Builder is browser hosted and we have gotten some requests for is to be able to install the application locally. With the Out of Browser feature people could connect to the server, “install” the application on their machine (including desktop and start menu shortcuts) and be able to develop off-line.
The other feature related to running out of browser is “trusted applications”. One of the nice things with Siliverlight is the security it brings with sandboxing. This does however mean saving files to the hard drive in locations like the My Documents folder isn’t possible. With Siliverlight 3 this means that files are saved to what ends up being some obscure location on the hard-drive that you really can’t control. With Siliverlight 4 by giving permissions to an application like the UI Builder to run as a trusted application you can save to your local drive in your My Documents folder more freely. This let you logically organize any projects you create with the UI Builder and also to zip a directory up and share it with others.
