c# - Registering an Application to a URI Scheme in windows 10

Question

A few years back I developed a Silverlight Component called from within an ASP.net web app, that uses PInvoke to access a USB (Serial COM port) on the client machine to allow for sending commands to some scanner hardware.

With the advent of Windows 10 and the inevitable demise of Silverlight I am looking for alternatives to accessing hardware on the client PC (This is all Intranet Web Application stuff where we have a lot of control over the implementation)

Currently I am looking at Registering an Application to a URI Scheme (Easy solution) as per this page:https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/aa767914(v=vs.85).aspx OR alternatively maybe Javascript navigator.msLaunchUri (This seems to not be supported in Windows 7, which we need to still support) Refer: https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/864863/documented-api-function-navigator-mslaunchuri-not-present-in-windows-7

The Registering of an Application to a URI Scheme works fine in Windows 7/8/8.1 but seems to have changed in Windows 10 - Does anyone know how I can implement this (Through C# code, registry, something) to allow this to work in Windows 10

Answer 1

I recently wanted to just this as well - and I found the answer so i'm posting it here for future reference and I couldn't find a working example in C# anywhere.

First of all your app needs requireAdministrator permissions. To do this, right click on the project in the Solution Explorer and click Add New Item, then select General and finally Application Manifest file if you don't already have one. In there, change the requestedExecutionLevel to requireAdministrator. Save.

I this is the first time you've done this, you'll need to restart Visual Studio as it probably isnt running under Admin privaleges.

Okay, so I wanted my app to create the registry key when it starts up, so in the constructor for my form I put in the following code, which creates the URL Protocol foo:// for a program called 'oggsplit.exe' (which I happened to have in my C: root so I just used that for testing)

RegistryKey key;
key = Registry.ClassesRoot.CreateSubKey("foo");
key.SetValue("", "URL: Foo Protocol");
key.SetValue("URL Protocol","");

key = key.CreateSubKey("shell");
key = key.CreateSubKey("open");
key = key.CreateSubKey("command");
key.SetValue("", "C:\oggsplit.exe");

Once you've configured that, save and run the program. You'll get no feedback, and as long as you don't see any errors it should have worked correctly. Now, open your browser (no need to restart or anything) and go to the address foo://hello. This is what it looks like for me in Google Chrome:

It will then ask you if you want to open your application from the browser, click okay. Hey Presto, your app opens from the browser, you can now put a specilised link into your web page to open your app from the browser. This Page also documents how to pass arguments through to your program as well.