Convert Silverlight APP to HTML5 SPA - Tools and Technologies

Question

My team is working on a strategy for converting our Silverlight application from the cloud to an HTML5 application. Although we are working on formulating a strategy to find the best set of tools, technologies and methodologies for converting our application to HTML, I ask this question here to get some feedback from a large community in SO and to learn from experience people who may have done similar things in recent past.

My question consists of several parts.

• Our application is written in Silverlight and uses the WCF RIA services. Most importantly, we rely on MVVM a lot, and we don’t want to rewrite this logic again to reuse as much code as possible. What, in your opinion, will be the best combination of tools and technologies for use by us?

• To make a SPA, we would like to use some of the “cool” new frameworks, but we really want to minimize our work (due to tight deadlines) and be able to thoroughly test our application easily and quickly (hence the reuse of code). Is SPA a good choice or should we go for a traditional MVC application? Remember that in our application more than 200 views.

• If we chose the SPA route, this structure is best suited in terms of life expectancy. We need to move away from Silverlight, because he will die soon. We do not want to be in this situation again in the near future.

Answer 1

Moving an existing Silverlight application and HTML5 web application is an ideal project for AngularJS. Angular has its own MV * design pattern, but you will not “reuse” code from existing Silverlight applications. The basic ideas and abstractions may be similar, but only the nature of how html and js work together, and especially how they work in angular, you have to do it in the Angular way.

In addition, Angular is a technical approach to web development. This is not a learning material about learning, but also about weekends. There is a lot going on. There are noob ways to do something in angular, a few noob-ish ways to do the same, and then the so-called “right” way to do it so that you can learn some ways to do things just to have them replaced with the “best” ways. "

If you want to "minimize your work," then Angular might not be the best choice, but if you want your HTML5 application to be truly awesome, any infrastructure you are in will require some training besides getting used to the inherent quirks Javascript

Angular 2 is hot and just released beta, but I still enjoy using AngularJS 1.4 for all production applications.