Best way of building an application having a UI like OUTLOOK?

Question

We are trying to build an application which has a UI like OUTLOOK? Something which has a left navigation pane and then right side there is a details pane.

It would be a heavy on data side. We need to access Database numerous times to access the data to be displayed.

Is SILVERLIGHT a good option which will provide RIA effect? Or Should I stick to ASP.NET building aspx pages and giving it a rich effect with Ajax?

What are different ways of handling this situation?

Answer 1

I would refer you to a great article that you might help you get started...

http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com/post/2008/06/19/How-to-create-web-application-user-interface-that-looks-like-Outlook.aspx

Answer 2

I've always thought ExtJS has a very Office 2007 Look and feel

http://www.extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/feed-viewer/view.html

Answer 3

I will suggest you look at WPF, it will be perfect for this type of application. It does have the advantages of both ASP.NET since you can create browser pages and also the UI capability of Silverlight, some people say WPF is like Silverlight with steroids.

Answer 4

The RadControls from telerik have a built in Office and Outlook skin and provide all the different controls you want (grid, left panel bar, right grid, right scheduler) Their controls are available for Silverlight, ASP.Net and WPF so you can try them both out and see what works for ya.

Outlook grid example

Outlook Panel Bar Navigation example

Silverlight Scheduler

I'm using them and they're great.

Answer 5

If you're going to use Silverlight or WPF then check out these blog posts on using the Prism framework to build a modular UI which looks like Outlook.

http://blogs.msdn.com/erwinvandervalk/archive/2009/03/02/how-to-build-an-outlook-style-application.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/erwinvandervalk/archive/2009/04/29/how-to-build-an-outlook-style-application-with-prism-v2-part-2.aspx

Prism (http://www.codeplex.com/prism) was designed to build just this sort of modular UI.

Ade

Answer 6

I think you need to decide whether your users are OK with installing your application (WinForms, WPF etc) or if it has be run from a web browser (Silverlight, ExtJS, Ajax). Constructing an Outlook clone in a web environment is often more difficult (browser compatibility), and you can have issues with performance. However web applications are easier to update and maintain.

Consider usability too. For a desktop application Outlook may be a reasonable model to follow, but users often expect the web to work differently from desktop applications.