14.20. Summary

One of the greatest aspects of Silverlight is its flexibility. If an existing control doesn't provide the functionality you require, then you can customize it to do so (although the Silverlight toolkit is definitely worth a look first: www.codeplex.com/Silverlight). All Silverlight controls can be broken down into primitive shapes such as rectangles and ellipses that can then be modified.

Think about the functionality that the control provides more than what it looks like. At a presentation I attended at VBug (a UK user group), EMC/Conchango suggested adapting radio buttons to create a tab control. The tab control is perfect for this situation because only one can be selected at a time.

For more information on this subject, please refer to http://silverlight.net/quickstarts/controltemplates.aspx.

Some of the things to consider about Silverlight include the following:

• It utilizes the .NET Framework (take that, Adobe Flash!).

• It makes use of existing .NET development skills.

• It has excellent media playback/streaming capabilities.

• It creates cross-platform .NET applications.

• It can be a better choice for creating a complex UI than JavaScript/Ajax.

• It has good third-party control support already.

• Silverlight/HTML integration has interesting possibilities.

• Because Silverlight is based on WPF, it is possible to convert Silverlight applications to the desktop (also consider Silverlight's offline support, as discussed in Chapter 15).

• It is supported in some mobile devices.

Finally, there are some considerations when choosing Silverlight:

• Silverlight requires a separate plug-in and is available on most (but not all) major operating systems. (Wikipedia has a good list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlight.)

• Sandboxed hosting environments could pose some problems.

• It doesn't have any printing or support for external devices (until Silverlight 4), which makes creating a line-of-business applications difficult.

• There are some layout issues across different platforms.

• Adoption is lower than Flash, although this is changing.

• Silverlight files tend to be larger than Flash.

• Current web site design trends prefer clean HTML sites rather than slower Flash/Silverlight applications.

• XAML has a somewhat steep learning curve but is becoming an important language within the .NET sphere.

• Silverlight is running on the client's browser, so it is open to manipulation. Do not store any sensitive data in the plug-in, and carry all validation on the server side.