I am working on an in-house tool for interfacing to a database. My current prototyping is written in C# using ASP.NET 2.0 with the intent to optimise some client-side operations using javascript.
However, I was hoping to leverage Silverlight to simplify the user interface development. Do I need to have the server upgraded to ASP.NET 3.5 for this or can I create the necessary web services in ASP.NET 2.0 for integrating with the client-side Silverlight controls?
yes Sivler light can be used with asp.net 2.0 and can be also be deployed to other platforms such as PHP
From the servers perspective it is only serving up a file with a XAP extension. So the Silverlight application itself isn't a problem.
Where do you do need to take care is on the web page hosting the Silverlight application. This can be a simple HTML page using an object tag or JavaScript you are fine. However you can also use the ASP.NET asp:Silverlight server side control and in that case you will need to make sure the System.Web.Silverlight.dll is deployed with your application and this does have a 3.5 dependency by using System.Web.Extensions.
So if you want to be independent of the server environment you best is to avoid the asp:Silverlight control.
Another thing that might be needed on the server is setting up the XAP MIME type to application/x-silverlight-app.