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How to accees the LabVIEW Web Server using Chrome?

Well the date came, and sure enough, Chrome no longer supports Silverlight in my version 45.0.2454.85.  Another browser I have installed still does support it so I can use that for now.

 

While we can talk about the reason to call Silverlight old and busted or not, the question I have is, what does NI intened on doing to address this?  Are they currently working on porting their Silverlight toolks to HTML5?

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They will probably say "It's up to MS to release a version of Silverlight that's compatible with Chrome" (i.e. non NPAPI)...but I doubt MS will do that given that the new browser with Windows 10 doesn't even support plugins (and therefore can't run Silverlight at all) and they have no plans to embed Silverlight into it (like Chrome did with Flash).

 

I therefore think that it's highly doubtful that any of the silverlight stuff that NI uses (remote front panels, web configuration tool) for existing versions of LabVIEW will ever work with browsers that don't support Silverlight (now or in the future) as they would need to patch out the Silverlight dependency from these tools for each version which sounds like a pretty mammoth task to me. If they don't do that, however, that's a pretty hefty chunk of functionality that no longer works and/or forcing users to use particular browsers to use them!

 

I think the best we can hope for is that a future version of LabVIEW removes the Silverlight dependency.


LabVIEW Champion, CLA, CLED, CTD
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@Sam_Sharp wrote:

 

I think the best we can hope for is that a future version of LabVIEW removes the Silverlight dependency.


I think that is the only option since MS has said they stopped working on Silverlight development a couple of years ago.  I can see why in the world of mobile devices that the technology didn't last long but being backed by MS I thought it was going to be a big thing for a while and I'm guessing NI was hoping for that too.

 

Maybe the teased "Porting the whole run time engine to Java script" from this years NI Week will also apply to these utilities.

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Hooovahh - Yes, I would stick with Internet Explorer or another browser that continues to support Silverlight in light of Chrome's deprecation of this feature.

 

>>What is NI doing to address this? Are they currently working on porting their Silverlight tools to HTML5?

 

We are of course investing in replacement technologies for the past applications that depended on Silverlight - web interface, remote front panel, web UI builder. Yes, we have chosen HTML5 as the best long term solution for deployment of web user interfaces. We are committed to using technology that will be supported modern web browsers, including those on mobile devices.

 

For a glimpse into a demo of some of this technology that is in development, click on the link below, click on the "Wednesday, August 5" tab, click on the "NI's Software Platform" video, and then jump to 7:24. You'll see our VP of Application Software giving a live demo of some interesting technology that he calls the "HTML VI".

http://www.ni.com/niweek/keynote-videos/

Joey S.
Senior Product Manager, Software
National Instruments
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Yeah, I expect that in future versions of LabVIEW there will be an alternative tool without Silverlight as a dependency. The only problem is that anyone using 'current' (i.e. until that time) versions is stuck (unless NI had something to say to the contrary - it wasn't clear from Joey's response).


LabVIEW Champion, CLA, CLED, CTD
(blog)
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Didn't MS announce 2 or 3 years ago that they were pulling the plug on Silverlight? Too bad NI didn't take the hint then to make the switch.

 

Mike...


Certified Professional Instructor
Certified LabVIEW Architect
LabVIEW Champion

"... after all, He's not a tame lion..."

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Maybe the took the hint and have been working on porting for years...

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Joey,

can you provide a definative statement regarding the cRIO base web page that requires Silverlight and when NI will have a Silverlight free solution?

I have customers with units in the field asking questions.

Thanks

Stu McFarlane

Stu
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To add even more reasons to kill silverlight.

 

Firefox will be dropping support for all NPAPI plugings (except flash) at the end of 2016.

 

See https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/


Websites and publishers which currently use plugins such as Silverlight or Java should accelerate their transition to Web technologies. The Web platform is powerful and can usually do everything that a plugin can do. In the rare cases where a site needs to extend Web technologies, the recommended solution is to develop the additional features as a Firefox add-on. Site maintainers should prepare for plugins to stop working in all versions of Firefox by the end of 2016.

 

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I have previously posted on this topic, in that I need to be able to authenticate to NI Auth from a python program running on a Raspberry Pi, and Silverlight is simply not an option.

 

In my post (7 months ago), I detailed what I could infer about NI Auth by setting up my own little man-in-the-middle attack on my own server. If NI would document the API, anyone could set up their own authentication client. NI Auth appears to use SRP, so simply providing some guidance would simplify the process of building secure lightweight clients.

 

As has been pointed out by others, Silverlight is dying. I can't manage my Web Services on my Windows 10 system, as even Edge doesn't support Silverlight. If NI posted the C# code for the client, this would be a good start, but if NI simply fixed this python code:

import requests
import srp
import base64

username = 'testuser'
myserver = 'http://127.0.0.1:8080'
r = requests.get(myserver + '/login?username=' + username)
niauthheader = r.headers.get('x-ni-auth-params')
my_fields = niauthheader.split(",")
srpdict = {}
for field in my_fields:
	g = field.partition('=')
	srpdict[g[0]]=base64.b64decode(g[2])

# srpdict now contains s, B, and ss. NI Auth wants us to return a POST containing
# A,M, and ss. We can snoop what the Silverlight plugin returns given the values for
# s, B, the username and password using a MITM attack (ZAP is good for this). If we
# can replicate the calls to SRP, we should get the same values for A & M. Referring
# to the Python srp 1.05 documentation, the easiest thing to try is:
usr      = srp.User( username, 'password' )
uname, A = usr.start_authentication()
M        = usr.process_challenge( s, B )

it would be an excellent start. I'm also hoping that NI Auth could be extended to support hardware-based authentication schemes like U2F. I have code that works with this, but it would be much better if the registration data could be managed within the server.

 

Thanks

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