Silverlight and corporate designs

Question

In the near future I want / will design an intranet application, which should be mainly based on Silverlight (version 4). There is the prerequisite, that this application should use he corporate design of my company. This corporate design is quite complex. Templates (HTML / Javascript) for that already exist, but there is no enforcement to use them. It is no problem to realize the design otherwise (for example with ASP.NET masterpages)

For me now the main question is, how should I start !? Should I write a complete Silverlight application or is it better to mix it up with ASP.NET. At the moment I have no idea how to realize the corporate design only with Silverlight. On the other side I think with ASP.NET masterpages it is feasible. When I mix it up ASP.NET, which project type in Visual Studio should I select ? Or makes it sense to use 2 projects (ASP.NET and Silverlight) inside the solution ?

I know, that there is the Silverlight Navigation Framework, but I have no experiences with it and I am not sure, if it is a good alternative to ASP.NET masterpages.

And my last question: Has anybody already experiences with silverlight and company corporate designs ?

Thanks in advance for your hints and help !

Answer 1

If you want to create a Silverlight application, but you don't know how to implement your design with it, then you have some research to do before you get started. Is it critical that the application be based on Silverlight? If you know how to do this with ASP.NET and you're lost on Silverlight, you may want to re-evaluate your choice.

That said, I'm confident that your corporate design/UX can be implemented in Silverlight using things like Prism. Using Prism, Silverlight can support modular applications that share a common UI framework, similar in concept to ASP.NET Master Pages.

If you are primarily a developer with few design skills (like myself,) you may want to consider hiring a contractor to help you with the UX. Silverlight is very powerful and offers a potentially overwhelming array of UX options. A WPF/Silverlight design guru can help you translate your UI concepts into actual markup.

Answer 2

Silverlight gives you the opportunity to make your application look anyway you like, in the same way that Flash sites can look however, with the same functionality.

You can't recycle your js/html/css unfortunately, and will need to rebuild it from scratch, most effectively using Expression Blend - although for best results, you need to hire a designer* to convert the graphical assets (eg the original .psds) into XAML with interactions, control templates/styles and animations - leaving you to worry about the backend and the designer to worry about the layout and look and feel.

* disclaimer - I am a Silverlight/WPF designer so I am biased :)

Answer 3

Sounds like a great opportunity to get your feel wet with SL :) Design-wise SL should be able to easily replicate what you can do with HTML CSS

+1 filixthehat on the Blend thing, it would be hard to get good visual design just hand-coding xaml in VS2008 (not impossible). As a developer, with some Photoshop experience (in photography) i didn't find it quite as bad an experience as some devs I've heard of. Once you appreciate the amount of xaml you don't have to write by hand you quickly come to appreciate it!