Corporate reporting Website (aka lots of Gridviews) - ASP.NET/Ajax or Silverlight?

Question

Hi,

My shop may win a new project for a corporate intranet web app. The kind of app where the typical page gives you a bunch of criteria (textbox/dropdown) to select, then retrieves data from DB to display these in a Gridview.

Silverlight has been pushed forward as an option (instead of plain old ASP.NET) and I gave it a shot.

And let's say that I'm not impressed so far:

• Layout by arrays (Grids, but I reckon it's the same)
• Datagrid control is pretty cool, but it's not a revolution, though...

So, for this kind of website, has Silverlight anything really new/cool to offer that I missed so far?

PS: as it's for an intranet, downloading a plugin isn't an issue.

Answer 1

Silverlight, at the moment, contains no support for printing. Therefore, as far as data heavy intranet type apps are concerned, it's a non-starter in my book. That may change with SilverLight 4. When it comes.

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx

Answer 2

Even though Silverlight isn't a "Silver Bullet" for a data-reporting solution, it does have some very nice features that can help you develop data presentation views relatively quickly.

For example, even though the Datagrid control may not have everything you're looking for, consider that it has features such as sorting, paging, grouping, and aggregation already built in. To the end-user, the Silverlight experience is a very smooth process.

I've seen some really good work done with ASP.NET, JQuery, and AJAX (e.g. Stackoverflow uses javascript extensively), but you might find that writing an advanced control to work in the DOM the same way that a Silverlight control works in Silverlight somewhat tedious to write (I'll admit that I don't have experience with writing controls in Javascript/JQuery, so I'm not the best one to comment).

You may consider looking at and testing third-party controls from vendors such as Telerik, ComponentArt, or DevExpress. They have feature-rich control suites that often have nice extras such print-support, pdf-export, and excel-export already built in.

It's worth noting that Silverlight 4 will natively support printing, but keep in mind it will use Silverlight's bitmap writer, which may be a little slow. You can download the newest SL4 Beta bits at http://Silverlight.net.

If I had a vote and I'm writing for a corporate intranet, I would vote for Silverlight if my developer base is already comfortable with the Microsoft technology stack.