Using Silverlight vs asp.net standard controls

Question

Over the past 6 months I've been developing web sites using asp.net. When I design something such as a contact form, 99% of the time I find myself using a script manager and update panels. Recently I tried out silverlight and expression blend, and I love it.

Is there any big cons for me to start building my forms with silverlight instead? The only big one I can think of is the user might not have silverlight and not want to download the plugin.

I guess to solve the has and has not issue, I could make a silverlight version and a standard version until it comes to the point where the plugin is as popular as flash.

Answer 1

Personally i would advocate doing everything in SL because i love what you can do with it. But common sense dictates otherwise. There is no point replacing relatively static webpages with a SL app. While there are methods to communicate/cooperate between SL apps and the web pages that host them, you don't really want to do this unless you have to, you can end up with quite a kludgy solution.

SL is not suitable for everything. The times you want to use it are when you can redo (or create) a whole web app (or significant chunks of it), and you want to create a more immersive and interactive desktop-like experience for the user. You also need to read up on authentication with SL and WCF services, SL navigation, and become familiar with the SL4 Out of Browser feature as it offers you some features/benefits beyond what is available to an in-broswer SL app.