Silverlight 3 and component library advice

Question

Hi,

I have to build a web application in a couple of weeks in your usual 3 tier, UI/Business Logic/Data Store, type way, however the customised UI really isn't achievable in anything but Silverlight or Flash (lots of custom vector drawing, fades, animation type stuff etc.).

Given I'm not a Flash developer, but am an excellent C# programmer, I'm going to use this project as an excuse to learn Silverlight 3. So, I have a couple of questions which I'd love to hear some thoughts on, to save me a lot of time up-front.

1. What is a great Silverlight 3 book? Unfortunately I'm not seeing an O'Reily book, which is usually my first preference. I'm looking for a book that gets right down to business, not a 'history of Silverlight' book. Here's a canvas, here's how you draw into it, type of thing. Is there value in buying a Silverlight 2 book, or has enough changed to not make this viable?

2. I want to use a mature Silverlight control library to take care of buttons, gauges, graphs, etc., so I can get on with the custom stuff I need to do. I've noticed there are a few different vendors. The ones I've looked at are: Telerik, ComponentOne, Infragistics and Syncfusion. Frankly they all look pretty good, but I'd love to know if anyone has concrete experience they could share to help me make a decision.

3. I've been noticing that Silverlight apps seem to run into performance problems vs similar Flash apps. Even the demos of the control vendors I mentioned in (2) seem to run at very variable framerates (I'm testing on a Mac with Safari 4 using Snow Leopard, but I notice this on IE and Chrome too on Windows 7). I don't mean to create a Silverlight vs Flash flame war here, it's just what I've noticed. Does anyone have gotchas I can steer clear of?

Thanks for your input.

Regards,

Shane

Answer 1

I can speak for number 2. I've used both telerik and silverlight control toolkit.

First off, the toolkit is free. Open source, means you can edit your controls. Not updated very often. Skinning is not really intuitive as telerik.

Telerik is very fast when it comes to updating their controls. Such as when SL3beta came out, they had a build 1 day after. When it comes down to customization, skinning is not really that simple for a newbie silverlight person. I went into editing their styles before i found out about skinning. Telerik's controls are not very flexible when it comes to customization as opposed to the open source sl toolkit.

They never crashed for me, my application sometime loads up over 100,000 rows in their datagrid at one time, loads fast also. I think they have a demo with over 1mil records.

All in all, telerik is commercial, you can get both the free control toolkit and telerik to look and perform the same, but telerik is somewhat noobproof and cuts your development time to about 1/3 of that for toolkit.

How i learned silverlight? I was fooling around since the beta for wpf and used that knowledge in silverlight. How i kinda perfected that skill, I watched all of the tutorials from silverlight.net. Those give the foundations then whatever feature I want to use, I'd google it.

Answer 2

I was in your position regarding choosing a toolkit recently for a GIS application, which led me to ComponentOne's Silverlight Studio. The controls themselves are fantastic, but perhaps more importantly I have found the support (even during my free trial period) to be incredible.

disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with ComoponentOne, just a happy customer.

Answer 3

The controls provided by these vendors are basically very standard and common controls. If you're looking for something innovative, something that can greatly shine up your RIAs, check out some fantastic Silverlight UI components from Intersoft. Check out http://www.intersoftpt.com/WebUIStudio/Silverlight