Silverlight and Model View Controller Pattern - do they play nice?

Question

I'm exploring my options for creating a web app that will play instructional videos (among other things). I want to use silverlight for the video player and for WPF. But I would also like to offer a non-silverlight version of the site for those who may not want to download silverlight their first time visiting. So I'm thinking I can use MVC and have a view for Silverlight and a view for asp.net webforms, but I'm not experienced in either silverlight or MVC yet.

I am aware of the MVVM pattern as well, but I would like to use a pattern that is both suitable to silverlight as well as regular old webforms.

So my question is how well does silverlight work with the MVC pattern?

Answer 1

In MVC, the controller is located at the application server which means your page with silverlight stuff has to be reloaded as the application is used which is not a good thing because you'll loose all state information of your silverlight application and will have to build mechanisms to recover them (e.g. using local cache,etc. )

Ideally, you load a silverlight application once and the it communicates using web services instead of page reloads therfore I beleive this patter is not very suitable. Having said that, if all you are going to use in silverlight is the video playing then the problem I mentioned is not that important and you could use the MVC pattern with some views holding silverlight content.