Silverlight Business Applications

Question

I'm interested in Silverlight Business Applications, and I was wondering if it is useful? I wonder if it is possible to do all my site with Silverlight alone?

I don't want to use JavaScript, ASP.NET's grids, other controls, HTML, jQuery or Ajax. I only want to build a site like online Banking System or e-commerce site only using Silverlight Is it possible? And I wonder about security and speed concerns?

All comments are much appreciated!

Answer 1

Sure it's possible to only use Silverlight but your going to miss the advantages of HTML, CSS and JS.

I would not recommend this.

You'll still need some kind of server side code. Like a Web Service to deal with data.

Accessibility

There are plenty of tools for blind users to interpret HTML. These do not exist for SilverLight.

Reinventing the wheel

HTML has a lot of mark up and controls build into it. CSS has a lot of page layout and UI manipulation build into it.

Silver Light does not provide alternatives by default because it's meant to be used with HTML / CSS

Mobile support

Mobile support is simply easier with HTML/CSS then it is with Silver Light.

JavaScript Libraries

There are a lot of JavaScript libraries out there to accomplish certain tasks. Silver Light just does not have anywhere near as many libraries and third party code you can rely on.

Cross Platform

There is Moon Light which is the open source alternative to silver light that allows you to run silver light applications on Mac and Linux.

This is not affiliated with Micro Soft and is therefore not as feature rich or stable. More importantly it does not come with any kind of support package like standard Microsoft tools.

Answer 2

We tried to switch our web sites to Silverlight. It was easier for us as developers. As you have to deal with XAML only and it always renders the same way despite the browser you use. We didn't change old pages, but started making new pages in Silverlight only. After a year or so, users started complaining about Silverlight experience.

Some problems that users were complaining about:

• Copy/paste - you can't select Silverlight controls and copy their contents to notepad/email whatever.
  
• Silverlight is not supported by all browsers. Some users like using our web site on their cell phones. But Silverlight didn't work for them.
  
• Silverlight can be fairly slow if you render a page with a big Height and lots of data. To make it faster we used ScrollBars inside of Silverlight controls. It solved performance issues, but degraded user experience because of too many scroll bars.

Well in the end we switched those pages to asp.net/mvc (html/javascript).

We decided to use Silverlight pages only when a lot of complicated user interactivity is required on a page or in such cases as showing cool jumping dashboard gadgets and graphs.

So, although I am a fan of Silverlight, I would not recommend to have Silverlight only for a web site with a broad audience.

Answer 3

For banking system it might be usefull for e-commerce it wouldn't be due to site indexing limitations. Another thing to consider is how many of your visitors will have silverlight installed. You will need some back-end service to provide data for your application.

However silverlight has some advanteges aswell for example it has the power of .net which means you could use linq and what not for paging querying and filtering and also you could the most of the your code base across ASP.net SL for Windows Phone or WPF for windows. Silverlight also has isolated strorage , pivot-viewers , data grids, paging and what not . Overall has good business oriented features, and if you had your hearth set on using silverlight or flash I would recommend flash, but they are not that suitable for making a whole website without any html. Good luck.