Silverlight; the good, the bad or the ugly?

Question

I've recently started a new project, and we plan to create this in Silverlight. We do want to develop it as a RIA, and based on previous experience with other .Net technologies (such as WPF) Silverlight feels like the right choice.

Silverlight has been around for some years now, and as version 3 is out I assume - and got the impression - that it is really getting settled as a stable platform that's gonna be around for a good while. However, I still see people complaining about Silverlight - saying it is bad technology that should never have been released. I'm getting the impression that these complainers often don't have any real experience with Silverlight.. Often based on a general skepticism towards Microsoft. And; I get it from non-Windows people saying; "well, if you're creating this is Silverlight that leaves me out of using it", but I thought Moonlight would solve that issue?..

So; is the skepticism towards Silverlight deserved, or has Silverlight become a good platform which we without fright can develop our new project on?

Answer 1

The problem with silverlight is penetration. The vast vast majority of users already have some form of Flash installed (98%+), wheras only a tiny proportion of users will have Silverlight installed (about 20% off-the-cuff). EDIT: http://riastats.com/ and http://www.statowl.com/custom_ria_market_penetration.php now have Silverlight penetration at around 40-50%. Other sources claim it's as high as 60% in some parts of the world - particularly the UK.

Ask yourself: What's my audience? Are they likely to already have Silverlight installed? Can I get it installed as part of a standard build (corporate)? If they see a "download silverlight now!" popup on my site, will they download silverlight, or will they look for a competing application that works with what they already have?

Now, from a development viewpoint, by all accounts Silverlight is wonderful.

Why would you use it over an alternative? If you've got shared components, if you're re-using code from another .NET app, if you've got internal .NET experience and no experience with the alternatives. Those are all good reasons to use Silverlight.

I suspect it's here to stay, and it will become more widespread with time. So, weigh up the good and the bad, and that'll tell you whether or not Silverlight is the right choice for you.

Answer 2

AFAIK Moonlight doesn't have all the features of Silverlight, especially those in v3, so relying on it to be a silverlight clone is a poor choice. If you must have universal access, then Flash (regardless of whether you hate it or really hate it) is still a better one.

I think Silverlight is as good a platform as WPF, but remember the NBC wholeheartedly accepted it, implemented their streaming video platform in it, and then dropped it after much money and reputation had been spent.

Whether more people can be persuaded to install it is another matter now the emphasis is on the fancy feature that HTML5 provides. In the future, Flash and Silverlight may both be obsolete.

Answer 3

It appears you have a misconception about Silverlight's multiplatform support. Silverlight is officially supported on Windows (IE and Firefox) and OSX (Safari and Firefox).

Moonlight is only required for linux and, as Iain mentioned, lags behind the official implementation.

Answer 4

I have done a fair amount in Silverlight (mainly in v2 so some of this might be moot in v3) and the problem at the moment is that it isn't yet mature enough as a platform. There are still some large bugs in it and it's incomplete in many areas (for example in v2 there was no (simple) way to create a multiselect list box without defining your own).

It also feels to me like quite a heavyweight solution for RIA unless you have really advanced interaction requirements. Even simple pages can take noticeable seconds to load.

It's certainly not terrible, it's actually quite nice to devlop in most of the time (when you don't come across a bug) but you have to be able to justify the negatives more than you have to do with other frameworks IMHO.

Answer 5

Linus Torvalds in interview recently said "hate towards Microsoft is an illness". There always will be people ready to badmouth Microsoft and Microsoft technologies on every ocassion. Silverlight and Flash/Flex are both very rich and perspective techonologies. Feature wise Silverlight is little ahead of Flex currently, but is behind in the mean of platform support (Moonlight is NOT a Silverlight and is NOT supported by Microsoft).

As .NET developer I'm much biased towards Silverlight and I'd personally prefer Silverlight if I had to choose between... But I'm pretty sure that you won't be wrong if you chose either of them - be it Silverlight or Flex they are bound to be competitors and competition is great thing.