Develop a line of business application in silverlight 4

Question

Currently as my job profile i am more working on asp .net application but i also wanted to have my hands on silverlight application. so, i just decided to build one silverlight 4 application in my spare time and on weekends.

We are having a team of around 4 people. We also tried for commercial application but as we can only develop it in our available time we can not commit on timeline as well as we people are new to SL, so first we need to learn concept and implement it. (Though we know the concept of binding, commanding,templates etc.)

Now i just thought to work on project like creating a social networking site in SL 4 having facilities like forum, blogs, calander, task, dashboard etc.

We want to use features like .Net RIA Service, Entity Framework, MVVM pattern, SL 4.

Objective here is to learn new concepts as well as to get some good project experince in silverlight.

Now,

1. what you people suggest is it a good idea ?
2. If yes then the project selected is correct or you suggest some other project ?
3. Any pattern or technology related suggestions ?

Answer 1

This is quite a vague set of questions but I'll attempt to give my 2 pennies worth of advice.

As a learning project this is as good an idea as any to get going with. As a commercial idea it probably isn't such a good one due to there not being any niche in your product. It has all already been done, and been done successfully by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Developing any kind of social media site is incredibly difficult as the market is already fairly saturated. As I said though, as a learning project it's quite nice as you can just borrow concepts and ideas from other sites and you can concentrate on you main goals of gaining knowledge in the various technologies.

Whatever you decide to do I'd say split the project up into much smaller components rather than having the end goal in sight. Try to take more of an agile approach by setting yourself 2-3 week targets. It should help keep the momentum going. My experience is that learning projects tend to die a death as people get bored of the concept and lose motivation to do it. By keeping the tasks small you get to see small results often. This should help keep you motivated as you move from requirement to requirement.

Answer 2

Personally I think setting up personal projects and goals like this are a great way of learning new technologies - good for you!! :-)

From a tooling perspective it sounds like SL4 is an ideal route to follow. This is highly likely to be released in early 2010 and has some awesome new features compared to SL3. Would also recommend using VS2010 and WCF RIA Service too.

From a code sharing POV have you considered hosting your project on Codeplex? This will give you a hosted TFS server to manage your source code in a distributed way. This is bound to save you some big bucks.

As far as document management is concerned Google Docs are certainly worth a look (as is Google Sites as a really easy to set up (albeit simple) project management portal).

Finally, I can't recommend learning SketchFlow highly enough. As a prototyping tool for silverlight it is really, really cool. Take a look at the PDC video for a great kick start on this.

Good luck :-)
Mark