Does Silverlight 3 Change the MVC vs. Silverlight question?

Question

I'm starting a new project soon and investigating whether or not to use MVC, Silverlight or both. This question Silverlight vs. ASP.NET MVC was a good starting point. But looking over the SL3 beta, it looks like there are two things that change the landscape just a bit. First, the navigation feature which is a direct feature of Silverlight and now there is the .NET RIA Services. While not actually part of Silverlight, it's fairly integrated and seems to bridge the gap between client and server operations. An area, in my opinion where MVC is strong and Silverlight (being a client side technology) was not. I understand that you can still use both, but should you and why?

Answer 1

I think that both technologies have their places - I think Silverlight will be used mainly for special purpose applications and asp.net MVC will be mainly for public and general purpose style webpages and web applications.

As to which one you want to use, well that depends entirely on your needs and your audience.

Answer 2

Simply put, no.

Silverlight and silverlight on the desktop are more like winforms/wpf applications that just happen to run on the web. They're stateful and act very differently from a web site. Silverlight apps can only be run on machines that allow silverlight to run. In a business network setup they may have group policies setup so that silverlight cannot be installed. Then you've got a problem.

ASP.NET MVC however is a stateless type of design where pretty much anyone with a web browser can get to regardless of platform. You have much more freedom with your site using ASP.NET MVC because you don't have a dependency on the end-user having any sort of runtime installed.

I think each has their place and it's pretty much obvious. Silverlight is great for creating a rich experience where applicable. I doubt you'll see too much silverlight popping up replacing web sites.

Answer 3

Silverlight is coming along nicely even for business applications (Navigation, RIA Services, Data Form etc...) But ya the big problem is the plugin.

Personally, I'm sick and tired of HTML so i'm focusing efforts on Silverlight.

It also depends if you're working on a site for fun or not.

Answer 4

When we built .NET RIA services we looked to enable developers to basically build out rapid RIA's 100% and as a result we targeted the approach in terms of taken over the burden of ASP.NET WebForms etc. To use the two in a hybrid fashion is possible, but it's a question of which piece do you want to take over the heavy lifting.

If you're Silverlight solution is basic in terms of implementation - ie datagrid of data only - then ASP.NET MVC is a better fit as this way you're not having to worry about deep linking etc (as that comes free inside a native HTML based approach).

If however you're building out a larger RIA solution within Silverlight and are using ASP.NET in ways that are specific, then ok thats fine, but you're going to have to remember that with every page refresh comes a penalty that is of course a page refresh and secondly you need to ensure the said Silverlight instance can find its way back to where it was before you hit the refresh (that or loads in a place that enables the user to find its way forward).

It can be somewhat very tricky despite the goodness we baked into RIA Services.

Scott Barnes / Rich Platforms Product Manager / Microsoft.

Answer 5

A lot of websites built for businesses and organizations have a "read only" public facing front end. That is, information (inventory, catalogs, corporate news) are presented from a rich database, but the average end user has no ability to edit them.

The natural pattern I have been seeing is to use ASP.NET MVC for the "front end" presentation but to use the Silverlight / RIA functionality to avoid having to write all the CRUD stuff int he administration back end. It is a great fit. The administration userbase is usually much smaller than the total audience and issues of download time, Silverlight penetration and so on are not nearly as problematic.

However the Silverlight RIA / ASP.NET MVC story is a very fuzzy one right now. There isn't much information discussing how to use RIA Services to provide access to a shared repository project of the style you build for MVC projects. link text This makes integrating them difficult right now. You could build both your MVC and RIA layers on top of a common EF or Linq2Sql base but it makes sense to share the intelligence of the Repository classed you build for MVC.

Ideally, we will get good documentation of connecting RIA Services to a Repository style class layer, independent of what the Repository uses to talk to the database underneath and then the rapid development story will be complete.

Answer 6

I dont think silverlight changes the asp.net MVC story.

MVC lets asp.net be more web standard friendly, and forces projects into a more testable, decoupled structure. The later was the sole responsbility of the architect/developer in webforms.

"Personally, I'm sick and tired of HTML so i'm focusing efforts on Silverlight." Amen to that. javascript too.

I've been developing web apps for over a decade (Classic asp then jumped to .Net as soon as it was in beta). MCTS x2 and MCPD x2 in asp.net. While i think ASP.Net MVC is great additon for web site developers, i do think web forms with a strict MVP pattern in UI layer is often still better for enterprise / B2b web applications. (dashboard, administration, reporting etc.)

That all said as i move into more into the integration space, SOA, biztalk, wcf etc. I really am over the giving a sh1t weather this css property is applied validly in "IE version what ever". or "firefox version whats next" and over dealing with the sometimes great sometime want to shoot myself control hierachy in web forms.

Silverlight 3 is really starting to become relevant for LOB applications, i see it as the major compeditor to webforms, not MVC.