Silverlight out of browser/in browser (or any browser delivered platform) which can talk to Windows Mobile devices?

Question

I'm attempting to write a browser delivered app which can talk to Windows Mobile, preferably in C# and using the RAPI2 library.

Is this at all possible?

Answer 1

Although you can write an ActiveX (Internet Explorer Mobile) or NPAPI (zetaKey or other Windows Mobile HTML5 webkit browser) 'plugin', these have to be installed before you can use them in a web page. Windows Mobile does not support on-demand installation of these.

Generally a mobile browser should be encapsulated from the OS and has no access to the OS or hardware of the device. The only exceptions I know are ActiveX and NPAPI plugins.

One other 'native' web app framework is PhoneGAP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhoneGap). It enables you to write an app once and distribute it to different mobile devices. The UI is rendered in HTML. See also the Jo framework.

According to this site (http://gizmodo.com/5037919/skyfire-mobile-browser-now-supports-microsoft-silverlight-plus-100-more-beta-codes) there is a browser called SkyFire wgich supports MS Flash alternative (SilverLight) on Windows Mobile (5, 6 or 6.5): http://get.skyfire.com/m/unknown.php

The problem with SilverLight is that is was designed for Phone 7 (not Windows Mobile) and I fear, although there are native extensions for Windows 7, there are no options in Windows Mobile nor Phone 7 (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/031510-windows-phone-apps.html)

What do you want exactly to do using RAPI?

regards

Josef