Comment by frou_dh
1 day ago
Sounds like a nice gig.
> It turns out that getting office workers to install a blessed plugin from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is much easier than distributing binaries that you have to install and keep up to date. And developing for it was pure pleasure; you got to use C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI interface builder
IIRC around that time, you could also distribute full-blown desktop applications (C# WinForms) in a special way via the browser, by which they were easily installable and self-updating. The tech was called ClickOnce https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/cl.... I think the flow was possibly IE-only, but that was not a big issue in a business context at that time.
Silverlight at some point was part of windows update, so most people needn’t do anything — just open the link.