Silverlight and Printing

Microsoft had an amazing opportunity for Silverlight to provide the most robust printing support of any RIA platform, based on XAML and XPS technologies. Unfortunately there isn’t even a native ability to robustly support local printing in Silverlight 2. They will probably address these issues eventually (and maybe sooner rather than later, but apparently not in Silverlight 3.)

To print from Silverlight to a local printer, you basically have to control HTML/CSS in browser and print via browser to local printer (good enough output, some challenges to implement.) Jonas Follesoe has provided great detail regarding Silverlight printing, here on his blog: jonas.follesoe.no

Our interest here is Printing to the Cloud (i.e., to an Internet-based print service provider like our company Mimeo.com), more than printing to a local printer-- although you have to start somewhere, and the desktop is a good place to begin! Since Silverlight basically uses XAML as its imaging model and XPS is a subset of XAML it would seem to make sense that one could create methods for converting Silverlight content to XPS, then send this data to the Cloud for processing and/or printing. XPS is not (yet) universally accepted, but then again neither is Silverlight. That said, it is just as feasible to generate PDF from Silverlight as it is from Flex.