[ShhhDontTell]

It gave the front end developer access to the native win32 API througb COM. That means you could effectively write a native app and deliver it over the web. Powerful but also malware-prone.

[Ididntdothis]

Really ? Maybe this was an option but I thought Silverlight was generally sandboxed. ActiveX could do native though

[rogihee]

Yup, really! I had a USB-to-Serial FTDI 232R with an actual device running in Silverlight back in 2012-ish. Just made a demo, but it worked.

[Ididntdothis]

Was that Silverlight on the desktop or in the browser? For a while Silverlight was the recommended desktop UI toolkit until it wasn’t a little later.