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

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.

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.