First, before people start yelling about "This isn't secure!!!", I am asking in regards to a private, business intranet site that is not publicly accessible over the Internet. We are in control of all of the systems and workstations.
Our users would like the ability to somehow launch a program from a web browser if installed on a user's computer. One example is, if there is a web interface that displays a SQL server IP address and a database name, be able to click a link and open SQL Server Management Studio on the workstation via the command line arguments to ssms.exe. Or being able to launch Visual Studio and invoke the /diff command line option which compares two files.
I understand this goes against all manner of web security, but is there any way that this could work out of the box (or via a Chrome extension)?
The intranet site is written in ASP.NET 4, though we're considering upgrading to ASP.NET Core 2.0 if that makes a difference.