Silverlight and Line of Business Applications

Question

Hello,

I'm trying to understand the best way to create line of business applications in Silverlight. I hear about entity framework and RIA Services and prism and I am completely confused. If I want to create a line of business application that pushes data to the the client application, which framework should I use?

Answer 1

You will likely want to use Silverlight + RIA Services. This is really designed exactly for that scenario.

I recommend reading Brad Abram's blog for info, in particular, What is .NET RIA Services?

He also wrote a very long, detailed series about RIA Services.

Answer 2

RIA Services gets data from the LOB application to your Silverlight client (and vice versa).

Entity Framework is the way to get data from your database to your LOB application (and vice versa).

Prism is a project Mozilla has developed that makes a web application look like a desktop application: http://www.riapedia.com/2007/10/26/prism_gives_web_apps_desktop_space

Answer 3

Well, Prism in the context of Silverlight is definitely not the Mozilla project mentioned in the other answer. Prism is a Silverlight/WPF framework from Microsoft. The "Overview" paragraph on the following page explains it pretty well: http://www.codeplex.com/CompositeWPF

I would recommend that you look into RIA services and the MVVM pattern to start with. Rather than Prism (which is a large framework that can seem daunting at first), I would recommend that you check out one of the smaller MVVM frameworks. I use MVVMLight from Laurent Bugnion (Sorry, I tried linking to it but stackoverflow won't let me. Just google it.) and that work fine for my requirements. Once you are comfortable with that you can decide whether you need the power of Prism or not. /Henrik

Answer 4

You can user WCF Ria services (very nice and usable data access) and silverlight. Prism is a very nice pattern for architecting modular applications, but I think that it would be an overhead if you want a simple application. MVVM is what you are looking for. MVVM is the design pattern depicting the presentation interacting with the model, but still you could avoid this also, if you want something pretty simple and quick. The learning curve from my pov includes (in order): Silverlight, WCF Ria Services, MVVM, Prism.