Folks, we have a Silverlight 5 app out there which draws pretty charts using Visifire <http://www.visifire.com/silverlight_charts.php>. The customers love it so much they've asked for something quite alarming ... "Can we put the charts into Powerpoint or Excel?". Bridging the worlds of Office apps on the desktop and a Silverlight 5 app in a browser presents one hell of a challenge.
A colleague asked me if an app in the browser could automate and control an office app. I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing this would require ActiveX, trusting it and installing it, and it would be some delicate code. Then I was asked if SL5 app displaying the Visifire charts could capture and flatten the rendered charts into an image to save as a file on the client. Perhaps feasible, but I'll have to do some research. The Visifire charts can be animated, so that might complicate things. If anyone has experience of ideas on this general issue of bridging Office and Silverlight we'd love to hear your 2ยข. Cheers, Greg K
