Can you build an entire application in Silverlight?

Question

Is it possible to build a good medium to full sized application using just silverlight as a host?

A few things that would be needed: - dynamic pages (one silverlight "screen" can switch between screens, like a normal app. - similar to a java applet which launches from the browser

I see that Telerik sells RadControls for WPF...but this is only useful (to me) if Silverlight can be a rich client platform through the web.

Answer 1

Although still a somewhat immature platform, Silverlight 2.0 supports many of the features that I would expect from a platform needed to create full sized applications.

• Data access through web services and local data/object query support with Linq
• Many feature rich controls such as datagrid, treeview, etc
• A very usable subset of the CLR (common language runtime)
• Access to restricted local storage on the client machine
• It is cross platform
• There are already some great add-ons, like Telerik and the Silverlight Control Toolkit

For your specific scenario, Microsoft has published a tutorial on Multi-page Applications

Answer 2

Absolutely. I've been looking into this and believe that it's as easy to do in Silverlight as it is in any other language. Remember that Silverlight 2 uses C# 3.0 and from that you can build anything that's not included in the Silverlight version of the CLR. Also, the fact that Microsoft gives you access to the .NET source code means that you can compile the missing parts of the .NET libraries with your application. (No idea about the licensing issues with that though.)

Answer 3

I've seen a presentation of a full featured CRM application two days ago. Although it's still alpha: It looks and feels like any office application. I don't know details but for me it's a proof of concept.