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591

answers:

7

Appart from projects funded/pushed by MS itself, are there any real-world examples of projects that opted for Silverlight?

What were your experiences? Learning curve? Advantages? Resources? Pitfalls? Sacrifices?

--EDIT--
I'm most interested in the developing (team)'s story.

+6  A: 

I was at a conference last week, and a number of non-MS people were telling their experiences of using Silverlight for line-of-business apps. Generally, it seemed positive. The advantage seemed that you could start with the Silverlight version, and then if you (later) needed more client control, mostly just copy the xaml and app code into WPF. mostly is important, as there are currently some glitches. But it is much harder to start with WPF and port to Silverlight ;-p

Sacrifices? Not as much power over the client. Limited framework, etc. Pitfalls? Not-quite-compatible xaml. Different IO, etc.

I can't cite specific projects, as I simply didn't write them down ;-p Besides, they might be company-private. Knowing that they exist doesn't violate NDA ;-p

Marc Gravell
Yes, portability seems a nice feat to me. As I read Hanselman's adventure of porting BabySmash to the Windows Surface.
borisCallens
+1  A: 

Check out the Microsoft Silverlight Showcase. There seem to be quite a few Silverlight apps in the wild.

jeffamaphone
He, I like how the website is the anti-example of why I should use Silverlight. It's dead slow. Also, am I the only one who thinks it's but-ugly? May answer part of my question though. Thx
borisCallens
But what I'm really looking for is the developer's story.
borisCallens
A: 

silverlight needs to get more popular projects

dankyy1
+3  A: 

I've just reviewed the Silverlight showcase for the UK, an IT market I know pretty well, there are 31 apps featured and the break down looks like this

8 x Games = 26%, 6 x Experiments and fun = 19% - eg christmas cards and Xaml XEyes, 6 x Demos = 19% - eg a Deepzoom picture, 11 x Reasonable web sites = 36%

Realistically 31 apps for the whole of the UK, of which only around a third are real, is a tiny amount of development. This could indicate a couple of things,

1) Serious Silverlight development isn't happening in the UK, but maybe is elsewhere

2) Companies doing serious silverlight dev don't want to use Microsoft's showcase

3) There isn't much serious Silverlight development happening yet

My gut feel is that Silverlight is taking a while to become mainstream, it's a brilliant technology, but users don't buy technology or features, they buy benefits .... We need a couple of killer Silverlight apps, then it will take off like Ajax did, once google (and others) showed the way

MrTelly
You might be forgetting the part where Silverlight is still not fully supported on all browsers/platforms where other web technologies are...
borisCallens
A: 

Retouch Genie Ltd - Online photo retouching and restoration site uses Silverlight for its gallery and main client area. Its got quite an interesting photo display control which is quite nice. Here is the link to the before and after gallery that allows you to see the photos in their original state and again after image enhancement.

A: 

We are in the middle of developing a system in silverlight that does real time communications with customers. The problems we've had are due to the lack of real-world samples and the change from VB to C# as there is next to no documentation in VB. Apart from that it has been great to develop in. Everything works well and development time was very quick considering it is a brand new technology. We're looking forward to the next release and it's enhanced video handling.

any example we can check out?
borisCallens
Unfortunately not, it is still in testing with the clients and whether we are able to open up a demo will be difficult given the nature of the system requiring them to authorise logins. Hopefully we will though.
A: 

Checkout silverlight case studies for developer story: business app - http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case%5FStudy%5FDetail.aspx?casestudyid=4000004876

TaraElayne