Regarding Creating Business application using Silverlight

Question

Hi, We are in the conceptual phase to create a relatively medium size enterprise business product application using Silver light 4.0, Entity Framework and WCF. 1. Is it adivceable to use Silverlight 4.0 for this enterprise business application development or should we go in for MVC.NET / ASP.NET? 2. We have planned to use REST based WCF service. How complex would it be to write the information back to the REST WCF service?

I appreciate and welcome your advice / suggestion. If you need any further details do let me know, i will be happy to share.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If ASP.NET (MVC) and Silverlight are my only choices, I'd take Silverlight.

If you were to choose ASP.NET (alone), remember that MVC isn't your only option. While MVC 2 is the hot ticket on the block, so to speak, WebForms is still being advanced and actively developed and supported by Microsoft.

Also, if you're going to be using Silverlight, you'll be using web pages anyway (at least one) and it's certainly conceivable (possibly desirable) to compartmentalize it such that you can use both.

Having said that, I would honestly recommend WPF over Silverlight for enterprise development unless it's absolutely necessary for it to be cross-platform. It's what it was built for and allows you to completely unleash the capabilities of the OS, not the least of which being that it opens up every security option WCF offers.

As for your question about how easy it is to write information back to a REST WCF service, I suppose the answer to that is relative to how good a developer you are. :) Honestly, it's pretty easy though. Specifically, I'd look into WCF RIA services for that sort of thing.

Answer 2

For Line-of-business apps i will prefer Silverlight. but if you are going for SL4 them i think you should also consider this:

http://christopherdeweese.com/blog2/post/using-silverlight-4-to-browse-netflixs-odata-catalog

Microsoft recently introduced OData as an alternate to WCF. I haven't played much with OData but its easy to work on REST based services but full control over it. I think you should further investigate your options and consider OData as well.

Regards.