Should I dump all WebForms/ASP.NET MVC and WinForms development and move to Silverlight?

Question

There seems to be a strong movement towards Silverlight, even with Windows Phone 7 rumoured to have dev based around it. Is Silverlight a valid alternative for all web/thick client development? You can remove the concern around plug-in requirements. I'm more concerned about it being technically deficient or cumbersome as opposed to traditional development. To this point I've been holding off learning how to leverage it and I'm worried the train may have already left the station.

Answer 1

Of course not. Not all problems are solved with a hammer; you should carefully evaluate the best tool to solve the problem at hand.

Silverlight is NOT a silver bullet that will solve ALL technology problems.

Answer 2

Is Silverlight a valid alternative for all web/thick client development? - any time you use words like "all" the answer is most certainly NO. Silverlight is overkill in some cases, but a great solution for others. AS far as being techincally deficient, Silverlight is almost the same as WPF, WinForm development and even ASP.Net forms development. It's basically controls raising and consuming events. MVC is certainly a different type of model, but it has its place also.

Answer 3

Definately not, silverlight is great so is flash, but i don't think they are great alone.

There aren't many (if any) examples of extremely popular sites that are exclusively silverlight/flash. They are great tools, and should be used in the context of tradtional HTML imo.

You can scrap webforms though, MVC is so much nicer.

Answer 4

Definitely not. Eventhough Silverlight has had an extraordinarily high acceptance rate, it's still far from taking over the web. Even if some sites will be developed in Silverlight, traditional web pages will still be used for the majority of web sites for many years to come. Perhaps Sliverlight will take over, perhaps something else will, perhaps nothing, that is too far in the future to see.

Learning Silverlight can definitely be useful, but you are definitely not hopelessly left behind if you haven't.

Answer 5

Silverlight (or Flash) is a nice way to give users desktop-app-like capability, multimedia, and non-standard user interfaces in their browser, but there are a lot of times where you want your web app to actually behave like...a web app. If everything for the web were written in Silverlight, how would search engines find anything? What if you want users to be able to bookmark links to particular pages of information? How would this work with Silverlight? Is a page with a Silverlight app going to render as quickly as a page that is just plain html? Is StackOverflow written in Silverlight? Would it be better if it were? Silverlight is a great tool for some jobs, but it definitely doesn't make conventional web apps obsolete.

Answer 6

Why not? If you whant develop for WM7 tomorrow, do it.

Answer 7

You should do whatever makes sense for your own personal development. But don't box yourself into a corner. Learn as many technologies as you possibly can. The more tools you have in your toolbox the more problems you can solve.

Personally I have a deep interest in Silverlight and I'm working on some business intelligence apps in Siverlight using WCF Ria Services. But don't box yourself into a corner.

Answer 8

If you're making a web site, I wouldn't do it in Silverlight. If you're making an app, though, I say go for it! Of course it has limitations that preclude it from being useful for all desktop apps, but there's no better way to make an app that runs in a browser.

Answer 9

If you and your team already have WPF\XAML experience and you need to create highly rich UI that run on over the web in a RAD way (maybe with some external design consultant using Blend) then SL might be a good choice.

Another thing that sometimes get overlooked if developing inside the enterprise is WPF app via ClickOnce.