move from rich clent ( WPF) to web based (Silverlight application) for multiuser application

Question

Hello Design Gurus and architects,

We have a multi user product prototype in WPF which works fine as a prototype. Now we want to build the complete product.

In our product we have scenarios where 2 - 3 users might have to use same data. Say one us editing and the other user is viewing the continuos edits. And also whenever a user changes a common itemm updates should go to all the other users on that same item, and they need to refresh their information. And this should happen without polling continuously.

Is there any advantage of going towards web based product development i.e in Silverlight.

Please advice and also if you need more details, please leave a comment and i shall try to be as elaborate as possible.

thank you guys.

Regards, Kedar

Answer 1

There's absolutely no architectural advantage to Silverlight over WPF in this situation. Your main advantages for Silverlight would be 1) smaller deployment 2) cross platform and 3) more integrated in-browser experience.

From the developer's perspective, however, you might actually find WPF better for developing this kind of collaborative application because you have access to a wider array of networking options. Silverlight has limits on what TCP/UDP ports you can access and has no built-in peer to peer networking capabilities like WCF does on the .NET Framework.

In any case, a Silverlight application for all intents and purposes is a client application, not really any more of a web application than WPF except when it comes to deployment.

Answer 2

Peer to Peer (p2p) vs. Client / Server

Your question really comes down to how you want to design your data storage.

P2P: Do you want each copy of the application to keep a full copy of the data and to exchange updates to the data with the other clients? This works well in a LAN environment but gets challenging over the broad Internet. BitTorrent is a good example of an application that does this.

P2P generally has higher performance and fewer costs but is very tricky to pull off. You'll need a p2p network transport like PeerChannel, and most likely a synchronization engine like Sync Framework, and some form of structured local data store like SQLite.

Client / Server: Do you want one master computer (e.g. server) to host all the data and have each client load / update data to the server? This works well in a LAN or Internet environment. Web browsers / web servers are a good example of this.

Client / Server has the overhead that a dedicated always on server computer has to be involved and you have to program two applications, the client side and the server side. Silverlight or WPF work well for the client piece of this design.

If you're up for a challenge, developing a p2p application can be a lot of fun because there are many obstacles to overcome and the end result is generally more efficient. This will essentially require you use WPF to get the libraries/tools support you need. If you need to get something working quickly, you'll find that the tools you have support client / server much better because this is how most applications are written. Here, WPF and Silverlight will both work, but they are only part of the solution -- you'll need a server technology too like SQL Server or ASP.NET or Azure or ...