I'm curious if there are any texts that can be recommended that actually discuss application architecture best practices with respect to the use of Silverlight in web applications. ASP.Net would be preferable, but I'm open to consideration of other technologies also.
+1
A:
I personally haven't seen any best practice guidance out there discussing this however I could make a few recommendations myself but it depends on the type of application being developed.
The typical usage so far of Silverlight has been for rich media and from that point of view architecture of the web site is hardly relevant.
However for Line of Business applications Silverlight 2 exposes some interesting solutions. We've just completed a rather large product development built on Silverlight 2 as the client application, calling a WCF 3.5 SOAP service, hosted in an ASP.NET 3.5 web application using the standard Membership Provider and WCF security plumbing, etc. and built on top of SQL Server 2005.
In terms of improving the architecture we plan to do the following:
- Replace SOAP with REST.
- Use PostSharp to introduce server-side data caching.
- Use PostSharp inside the Silverlight client application to intercept data service calls for client-side caching.
I hope this helps. Feel free to ping me if you would like to discuss anything further. You can contact me on my blog (http://craign.net/).
Craig Nicholson
2008-10-17 17:29:10