Why Silverlight?

Question

My question is that why more and more business applications are being built in Silverlight?

When I say business applications, I mean day to day data entry applications. Back office kind of applications where there is more data entry and emphasis is on usability rather than rich UX.

Does it make sense to invest in Silverlight for sake of silver lighting it?

Answer 1

Why not?

And compared to what?

There is a learning curve especially if you're new to the Silverlight/WPF/XAML world, but once you get a hang of it and especially of the MVVM pattern, it's much easier to create such applications, and that is even without having to resort to further RAD tools like the WCF RIA Services or LightSwitch.

It's a big advantage to be able to re-use domain logic/validating code without having to replicate it in JavaScript and keeping it in sync.

It's also much easier to create self-adjusting layouts for example and to apply one of those available, (halfway) decent themes, without having to struggle with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Image Sprites.

Of course browsers become more and more powerful with the advent of HTML5 and SVG, making plugins more and more obsolete. But I have faith that when the time comes, Microsoft (or someone else) will make that development model compile and render to HTML5/SVG/JS then, because it's just too good. XAML is an Application Mark-Up Language after all and thus can serve very well as a GUI abstraction layer.

Answer 2

Why Silverlight? Well, comparing Silverlight with Flash and AJAX (all answers are subjective):

• Language & Platform. C# is much more strong typed than ActionScript and even more than Javascript. I like it as a developer because more errors are caught in compile-time, more generic containers are available (compare .NET generics to lone Vector in ActionScript).
• No browser-compability hell, like in JavaScript.
• Developer tools. Visual Studio is the best IDE I've seen.
• Bugs. I faced many strange bugs in Flex development, which caused to search workarounds and even change Flex classes. I don't remember anything serious with .NET (don't saying it's bug free, just much lower rate).