ASP.NET MVC vs Silverlight for an internal application

Question

Hi, I'm in the early planning stages of an internal application and I'm considering ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight 4 as my possible platforms.

The Environment
We're a Microsoft shop and we're in the process of migrating desktops to Win7 (from XP) and servers to W2k8, I'll be able to get Silverlight 4 installed as part of our baseline Win7 build

The Application

• Provide a dashboard to monitor system status
  • Monitoring third party connections
  • Monitoring database tables for particular events
  • Monitoring SQL Server Log Shipping
  • ...
• Provide portal like access to system tasks to end users
  • Bulk updates to databse rows
  • Running SSRS Reports
  • Re-running automated tasks that have failed
  • ...

The Team
We're a small team of 2 and neither of us have production exeprience in Silverlight or ASP.NET MVC so we'll be learning whichever we go for.

What would you pick and why?

Answer 1

Silverlight. I think ASP.NET MVC more for public websites, whereas internal applications - Webforms or Silverlight in your case.

Answer 2

Silverlight - Desktop > Web for applications (not for simple data presentations though) whenever possible. The bad news is that desktop is not always possible. The good news is that it is possible for you. You can even use the out of browser features which is even cooler.

Answer 3

Use Silverlight with the MVVM pattern.

Answer 4

I would pick ASP.NET MVC. I have experience in both Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight undoubtedly has a steeper learning curve. While it will definitely enable you to develop rich user interfaces (it enables amazing composition) it may be overkill for an internal application.

ASP.NET MVC on the other hand will enable you to do what you are aiming to achieve but I believe (due to the learning curve) you'll be able to do so MUCH more quickly. It is also much easier in my experience to enable dependency injection and write unit tests for ASP.NET MVC than it is for silverlight which may or may not be a consideration..

Answer 5

The answer really depends on your experience. If you are an experienced web developer and have a lot of practice with ASP.NET then use that for sure. If your background is WPF and WinForms then use Silverlight.

My experience is that the ramp up time to use Silverlight for an ASP.NET developer is significantly longer than it is for a straight .NET application developer. The ASP.NET developer has to unlearn a great deal before they begin because the development paradigm for Silverlight is more akin to app development.

The other alternative is to use both. ASP.NET for the navigation, authentication, general layout and Silverlight for the data realisation (graphs etc).