I think Silverlight will be huge for business applications. These are a few points that highlight Silverlight's strengths as a LOB platform inside the browser. This is what I wrote to help a colleague who compared ASP.NET and Silverlight, but hopefully it includes some tips.
Additional Silverlight Features
- You can turn off caching of static data using isolated storage today - just organize the data in JSON or XML and save it locally.
- Enhanced support for tools for UX - with jQuery you will write all the additional UX manually. I don't know if this is a big problem, since jQuery is really elegant.
- C # over JavaScript - best debugging and developer experience.
- Support for multiple streams, internetworks, and sockets.
- Support for local file access. Suppose you want to import a CSV file without having to round to the server. In Silverlight, you can use FileOpenDialog and read the contents of the file locally.
- Simple WPF Portability
Additional Silverlight Controls
- The first batch of out-of-band Silverlight controls will be available in the PDC and will include the following controls: DockPanel, WrapPanel, ViewBox, Label, HeaderedContentControl, Expander, TreeView, NumericUpDown, AutoComplete, Accordion.
- Scott Gu hinted that over time, Silverlight could get more than 100 controls if you count out-of-band controls released in CodePlex.
- More details at http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/09/17/control-freak.aspx
WPF Portability
- There are some significant differences. Non-UI code should be simple enough to port to WPF.
- If you're not too creative in your style, most management ports, too. One of the main differences is that Silverlight uses the VisualStateManager instead of the Trigger to style the controls. There is a community project to add VSM support to WPF to make porting applications easier. VSM will be added in a future version of WPF to make two more pairs.
- You will be able to reuse ALOT of knowledge, project assets and code.
- I made a blog post about porting my Dive Log application (small but highlighting some of the problems) to WPF: http://jonas.follesoe.no/PortingTheSilverlightDiveLogApplicationToWPF.aspx (did it in a couple of hours).
UX data entry
- Silverlight will simplify the implementation of more complex client-side validation rules, making your data entry forms more responsive with less rounding to the server. You can do this with AJAX, but more effort is required.
- With Silverlight, you can create creative and improve data entry forms and add nice effects when you enable / disable parts of your form based on the choices made earlier in the form.
- You can create cool widgets for data entry. Link how you set the Air-In / Air-Out in the dive registration application by changing the air level in the air tank, instead of just entering a value in the text box.
Visual
- You can do a lot of cool things with the jQuery animation APIs, but Silverlight makes it easy to create a rich user interface with animations, beautiful scalable vector graphics, etc. For simple ASP.NET, you probably have more third-party controls / components to choose from, but for simple graphical rendering, Visifire graphics are great.
Copy / Paste / Select Text
- I do not like that it is difficult to make text that can be selected / copied.
- Silverlight's exceptional printing experience is also limiting. It just prints that on the screen. I am working on a blog post showing how to create HTML behind a Silverlight component and use CSS for printing. A.
Search engine optimization
Suppose it depends on the requirements of your customers. If your data should be searchable, you can work around this by having ASPX pages that display data as HTML behind the Silverlight page on first load. So your site will look like ShowCustomer.aspx? CustomerID = 10 - Silverlight displays client 10 on the form, and HTML representing the same information is displayed behind the Silverlight component. You will then also provide a Sitemap so that Google knows how to index / find the content of your page. But that would be doable.
If your application is very “application-like,” this may not make sense, since it is difficult to create a URL for the different states of your application.