Silverlight - Good for Internet Business Application ?

Question

I've heard the comment several times, once in one of Shawn Wildermuth's podcasts, that Silverlight is great, but might not be so good for 'entire' internet applications. This comment never get's amplified, but the implication seems to be that you would use Silverlight in conjunction with standard aspx web pages.

So far, the only downside I can see to an all Silverlight application is that the XAP file could get very large, meaning that when a web app is opened, there would be a very noticeable delay.

Most of the apps I do in .NET would be considered small. They are business / CRUD apps of maybe 25 aspx screens along with the supporting cast.

Does anyone have an expanation of the downside of a mostly Silverlight app?

Thanks Mike Thomas

Answer 1

I'm aware of Shawn's comment, but I think it's a bit dated. If I remember correctly that comment was made before Silverlight could easily handle browser navigation, deep linking and SEO. Those issues are addressed now (largely thanks to RIA services) and Silverlight is a first class web citizen imo. I've done 2 Silverlight only business apps (i.e. the Silverlight content is full screened; there are no ASPX parts to the apps) and have been quite successful with them. A big plus about creating a Silverlight only site is that it's very easy to debug homogeneous content. Take a look at .NET RIA Services if you're seeing holes that need to be plugged when creating a SL business app.

EDIT: RIA Services is Silverlight framework that facilitates development of data oriented Silverlight applications - it's currently in a preview (i.e. not finished) release state but my experience has been that it's stable. WCF is a communications framework used by Silverlight to enable client to server connectivity; it's very similar to traditional web services. RIA Services uses WCF to perform client/server communication. Check out Brad Abram's post "What is RIA Services" for a quick overview here http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/19/what-is-net-ria-services.aspx then read his full 25 post series for all the details on RIA Services here http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/08/02/business-apps-example-for-silverlight-3-rtm-and-net-ria-services-july-update-summary.aspx

Answer 2

Many thanks James, .NET RIA Services are my next stop.

Is RIA a subset of WCF, WCF a subset of RIA, or are the two separate technologies?

Thanks Mike Thomas

Answer 3

If you want to see a complete Silverlight application in action, check out http://www.mediacourtyard.com. They have implemented a complete CMS front-end in Silverlight. Check out the demo, it appears to be fairly stable and functional.

(I have nothing to do with them btw. I trawl the web for Silverlight apps a lot and that CMS is the coolest "full" app I've found so far.)