Architectural pattern for ASP .NET and Silverlight UI

Question

Hello,

do you know of any available architectural pattern where the most of the code could be shared between Silverlight and ASP .NET UI? I understand that Silverlight won’t work very well with MVC (although people are blogging on how they achieved this in fact what they did wasn’t pure MVC) and same applies to ASP .NET MVVM.

However, I’m pretty sure there is a pattern where all of your business and data layers could be re-used by both Silverlight and ASP .NET app?

The example of when this would be needed is if we created a web application using Silverlight for desktops and asp .net for mobile devices and iPad, assuming that everything but UI would be the same.

Answer 1

You could simply creat a business logic layer assembly that would be used by both the Silverlight and ASP.NET versions of the application, the UI would be different but they'd both be using the same business logic or whatever you want to call it. The trick however is that Silverlight is a client technology so the server-side piece would house all that shared logic and you'd need to then interface that through a web-service your client could talk to, but that goes without saying when it comes to Silverlight/client-side technologies.

Answer 2

Contrary to what you've heard: Silverlight works great with MVC!

As far as sharing code the simplest answer is to have a single implementation of your data layer and business objects in the MVC application and then expose this to your Silverlight application via web services.

Ideally this means that the only code in your Silverlight application is UI specific...

Answer 3

RIA Services works with both Silverlight and ASP.Net and provides both client and server validation via member attributes. Code is shared auto-magically between sever and client apps.

Answer 4

You can use WCF and/or Ria services for data layers.