What's the advantage of one over the other? I am so tempted to implement everything in silverlight now, so is ASP.NET, in particular, with Ajax, going to be dead?
For an enterprise solution especially, with 100+ views and 1000+ pages, is it still feasible?
Why isn't silverlight adopted that much by most enterprises? It is mostly used for videos and galleries, etc.
Cheers
Silverlight is a client-side based solution. It's a miniature .NET runtime and Windows Presentation Foundation package, rolled into one and made (somewhat) cross-platform.
Silverlight won't work on your iPhone, it won't work on really old PCs, etc... You can use it in the enterprise, but if you're doing an enterprise based app based on it, you should probably just develop your stuff in WPF and get all of the features of .NET.
Silverlight isn't adopted much because either A) enterprises are using Windows Forms or WPF because they can or B) because it's relatively new to the game, and it remains to be seen how much traction it will get in the marketplace vs. Flash and Java.
Why isn't Silverlight adopted by enterprise? Because most computers would need a client installation to view the site. Flash is widespread (most computers have at least some version). HTML and Javascript are even more commonly supported. But Silverlight would definitely be an annoyance which would lose some users.
That said, we use some Silverlight on our internal apps. We have a portal/intranet which runs in a controlled environment and we use some Silverlight there. But Flash and Ajax on the public site.
Two completely different tools.
They aren't even competitors, much less one killing the other off. Silverlight just came out, requires browser plugins and a client-side runtime, and only has a fraction of the .Net framework available to it. Enterprise hasn't adopted it yet because most clients are wary about having to roll out browser plugins (anyone remember IE5 and ActiveX?) and still consider Flash a more mature and viable way to do client-side browser apps.
ASP.Net works with any web browser, is well-established, has access to the full .Net framework and the web environment, and can easily handle the load that you are sort-of describing, as long as you know how to set it up properly.
Some advantages/disadvantages:
Silverlight
ASP.Net
I can do some amazing things faster in Silverlight than with ASP.net, which would be perfect for a targeted population like enterprise customers. I can't run Silverlight off of my Iphone but I have accessed some of my ASP.net apps from it so that's one example where ASP.net wins.
I'd say it will grow but even at version 3, it's a jumble of codeplex projects and 3rd party controls.
I'm looking for a solution now for drag and drop treeview which I can do easily in AJAX but having trouble finding a solution with silverlight and I've tried on my own.
I would learn both and mix them.
I've targeted certain areas of my personal sites for Silverlight, but am wary of overloading a user with too much. For a blog, for example, I wouldn't redo the whole site in Silverlight--that's overkill--and similar to how you wouldn't have (or shouldn't have) an entire site done in Flash. No matter what, some people will have it blocked or not installed at all, and why exclude potential users/clients/readers?
There's the fact that clients need the runtime installed, which means I'm hesitant to convert any critical functionality over to Silverlight for fear someone just won't have or want to install the runtime.
As far as professionally, we are moving forward with web apps that at least partially make use of Silverlight, but the targeted audience is fairly well-controlled in that we can tell them, "You'll need to have Silverlight installed", and we can reasonably be certain they'll comply. For internal tools where it makes sense we are 100% Silverlight all the way as we have total control over that audience. Again, though, the usage has to make sense.
I am tempted to say go with silverlight, its installbase is still low but its because there still isn't very many silverlight apps out there. It is still very easy to install(not as easy as flash though) so I dont see that as a big issue. Html was never ment to be used for applications so a silverlight app is far better suited for application programming. This is of course only my own opinion but I am sure the direction is more, bigger and higher quality applications running on web and not least apps running on mobiles (Silverlight is also coming to mobiles)
I think we need a better programming model for web applications to keep productivity up when creating more complex web applications and silverlight is certainly a step up from html and javascript.