I was reading the ASP.Net vs Silverlight (Reach vs Rich) and need a clarification, if the requirement is to force everyone going to use my app is to download silverlight, then performance and security wise, silver light is better solution than ASp.Net (also avoiding activx controls for developing rich grids)? I am doing all the development in .Net and know better silverlight than ASP.Net
Thanks,
Not sure exactly what your getting at, but Silverlight can be used along with ASP.NET so you can get the best of both worlds. Choose to use Silverlight for grid controls instead of activex is a great use of Silverlight, IMO.
My point is that there is no reason you cannot use both at the same time to maximize the power of your application.
My main thoughts on this are:
Silverlight is cross browser compatible, what you see in IE is what you'll get in FireFox, Safari and the same on the Apple Mac versions of the browsers. If your app is an Intranet application then ASP.Net would probably be quicker to implement, however if you're trying to write an Internet app then Silverlight would offer this as a major advantage. Styling websites to look the same on all browsers is a huge pain.
Silverlight has security restrictions in terms of the types of services it can access and what you can do with data. This is due to the plug-in running all of the code on the client side, so obviously MS don't want bad plug-ins downloading trojan horses etc. ASP.Net does have some security restrictions but most of the code runs on the web server.
The two can be used side by side, so you could mix and match however I think this is two technology stacks to learn when only one is needed.
In silverlight 3 which is rumoured to be released on July 10th (SDK's available now) you can take the silverlight application out of the browser, so if your app might need to run offline then you can download a data file to the isolated storage and then work with the data from the datafile instead of from services. Then when the app connects back online you can synchronize the data file with the db.
Silverlight 3 allows you to write animations which will take full use of the graphics card instead of maxing out the processor.
In my opinion Silverlight is quickly going to become the main Microsoft platform for web applications, the amount of investment and resources they are throwing at the Silverlight projects shows that MS think this as well.
As you can tell I'm fairly Silverlight biased.
Since I've gotten hooked on the ASP.NET MVC bug, I've been using Silverlight for rich controls - especially the data grid control when customers really want to edit a grid. However, for most of the display or detail screens, single domain object editing, etc., why use another tool if it isn't needed? Text boxes, check boxes, etc. work just fine in any UI.