Is Silverlight suitable for a large LOB application

Question

So, I am on proof of concept for a rather large LOB application. The application will be deployed on many desktop computers (200+) in many organizations. It will contain many CRUD screens (about 100), as well as some rather complex processes, such as creating accounts and integrating a financial book. It will also contain many reports.

I already did a lot of homework and pretty much decided to use a technology stack:

• PRISM
• CSLA
• NHibernate

All that is missing is the presentation layer, so my question is this:

Is Silverlight 3 the right technology to build such a large application?

I was initially worried about the lack of reporting history for Silverlight, but now there is

Is Silverlight 3 a smart option or should I look at WPF? The main reason SL3 was the problem of deploying a large number of desktop computers in many organizations.

Answer 1

I would suggest Silverlight 3.0 for a LOB application if your application requires the following.

• Rich client interface
• Freelance / occasionally related scripts
• The ability to simulate a web deployment model

While the frequency of your releases is reasonable, I think that these benefits outweigh the side effects of a large bootstrap.

On the flip side, Id revises using Silverlight 3.0 if one of the following conditions is true:

• You need to interact with USB devices such as scanners.
• You need to interact with other applications on the client.

If you are guaranteed a standard client, you can explore the Click-Once Windows application. It overcomes the above limitations, is not sandboxed, and you can still use the web deployment model.

Answer 2

We are making an SL3 application for more than 5000 users, but with fewer screens (30+), and we can do it. We also release an application with 4 screens for the same number of users. If you are concerned about download performance, you can do two things:

• Combine XAP with something nice, like 7zip - it gives much better results compared to its own compressor.
• Divide the application into separate SL3 applications and download the appropriate components on demand.

Answer 3

To reduce the initial application, you can also load XAML modules (even if this complicates the situation). As a rule, users do not mind the download time if the application has a good answer when you work with it (and this should correspond to SL3 beautifully). Perhaps another alternative would be .net with ajax and SL3 for the user interface, where this is absolutely necessary.

This is a completely new technology to create such a large application, but it must be doable. If it gets too heavy, it can be solved by creating various modules. Remember that also save work tasks that are logically performed together in the same modules.

Answer 4

Also note that the Silverlight runtime is available only for Windows and Mac, so forget about Silverlight if you want your application to be used from a browser, say, in a Linux box.

(Yes, I know that there is Moonlight . But I will not put my eggs in this basket, unless for some obscure reason Microsoft decides to participate in this project.)