I have an intranet website which is basically porting over a WinForms application to make it web accessible. There is a very specific block of code though which in the winforms program a user clicks a button and it saves a bunch of stuff from their registry into a database. Long story why it does this but its important.
What would be the easiest way for me to do this through a browser. I obviously anticipate I'll need to write a plugin or something. Anyone have experience of this in C#?
As far as I know, a plugin is used by the browser to handle a particular content type. That's not going to be of much use if you need it to interact with a page.
The more modern solutions like Silverlight are all restricted to the browser's security sandbox. So no direct registry access is possible.
If targeting IE only you could build an ActiveX control. ActiveX will allow you to go beyond the browser's security sandbox.
A signed Java applet would probably work on other browsers as well. A signed applet can also go outside the browser's sandbox though I must admit I'm not familiar with all the details. There's more info on accessing the Windows Registry from Java here.
In either case I think you'll need to get a code signing certificate in order for browsers to trust your code. Even a signed applet or ActiveX control will pop up a dialog asking for the user to confirm it's execution in their browser.
