Does Microsoft use or plan to use Silverlight in its own web applications like MS CRM? Is there any known risk for Silverlight LOB applications instead of ASP.NET? Silverlight 4 still does not has wsHttpBinding. Is this a stupid question?
+2
A:
Not a stupid question, but you do have to remember that the cost of rewriting an application (any application, for any reason) is very expensive.
Yes, I think Silverlight 3 and 4 are enterprise-ready. There's still a learning curve, especially with services and managing performance for large applications that may need dynamic loading. But Silverlight has arrived, and I think you'll see more and more of it.
Cylon Cat
2010-06-14 11:44:33
+1
A:
Silverlight 4 finally has most of the stuff that I'd be looking for in an enterprise application. You can print (at last!), you've got decent data and web service access, and the tools (VS2010 and Expression Blend 4) are more-or-less in place. Managing and troubleshooting your data bindings is a little easier (though not nearly as easy as it should be).
That said, you still have to choose between WPF on the one hand, and ASP.NET/MVC on the other, with Silverlight being a sort of middle ground. Unless there was a specific reason to do it otherwise, for most enterprise applications, Silverlight would be my choice. Creating a great UI with JavaScript/HTML/Ajax is still harder than C#/Silverlight, and WPF doesn't generally offer anything that you can't get with Silverlight and a little bit of cleverness.
Ken Smith
2010-06-14 12:24:05
I still have a little worry about lake of wsHttpBinding in sliverlight
Nima
2010-06-14 12:47:27
@Nima - I agree with you regarding wsHttpBinding, but honestly the SOAP libraries available for Flash/Flex are pretty painful (they're buggy, slow, and incomplete), so you really don't have another major RIA toolkit as an option. A nice option you might consider with Silverlight is the new .NET RIA Services: http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/riaservices/
free-dom
2010-06-15 07:15:08
For an enterprise app, is there any reason to use the wsHttpBinding instead of Net.TCP? Net.TCP is dramatically faster, and in an enterprise environment you wouldn't normally have the security and access issues that might cause you to drop back to one of the Http* bindings.
Ken Smith
2010-06-15 18:46:54
It's not a intranet application, Web access is essential.
Nima
2010-06-16 03:31:10
You can still use Net.TCP over the Internet, of course: it's going to be blocked by firewalls in a very small percentage of cases. Is your concern that you may need to access *other* services (that you don't control)? If so, the best option might be to access them from the server, rather than from the client. But you're right: that's a bit of a workaround.
Ken Smith
2010-06-16 17:47:24
A:
Microsoft are working on controls for dynamics http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mscrm4/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=203
They're building the UK NHS CUI with it: http://www.mscui.net/Showcase/Showcase.aspx
And it's the core runtime for Windows Phone 7, so I figure it's Enterprise ready ;)
Doobi
2010-06-16 07:24:25
A:
Why does Silverlight make sense? (rhetorical question)
If intranet, then just use WPF - the old arguments of deployment issues don't really stand with .net 4.0 ?
If internet, then you'd not use it - using a plug-in just makes no sense anymore - use asp.net in that case... you don't really want users - especially coming to a LOB site to run away because they have to install a new plugin - too risky!
I'm not sold on Silverlight - it's a subset of the framework and outside of a smaller .net install really doesn't provide what users want. Why not get the whole thing vs. a subset?
ie. users on the web are used to a certain web behavior - and Silverlight feels more like a glitzy plugin than a true web application.
Steve
2010-06-17 04:00:15