15.20. Silverlight in the Real World
Some developers consider Silverlight little more than a toy at present and argue that it is not suitable for serious line-of-business applications. Can Silverlight really be used to produce a line-of-business application? I talked to Rusty and Andy at SharpCloud about their experiences of developing a Silverlight application.
15.20.1. Rusty Johnson and Andy Britcliffe
SharpCloud is currently developing a "project risk assessment application." The application does complex calculations to determine the optimum order for carrying out projects. The application is built using Silverlight and WCF, and it runs on Windows Azure (see Chapter 16). It is shown in Figure 15-34 and Figure 15-35.
Figure 15.34. SharpCloud's Silverlight application
Figure 15.35. SharpCloud's Silverlight application
Rusty and Andy summarized their experiences here:
They developed a usable application from scratch in about four months (that's "startup" days, not 9 to 5!).
It is quite easy for .NET developers to get up to speed with Silverlight (although Andy did have a lot of Silverlight experience). Andy mentioned that some developers might struggle to understand the async event model.
Don't load your entire application at once, but be prepared to use dynamic loading facilities (Andy recommended looking at PRISM and the following URL: www.sparklingclient.com/prism-silverlight/).
Be prepared to do much work tweaking the performance of your application.
Utilize third-party components (graphing in particular) because Silverlight's current toolkit is lacking.
Some third-party Silverlight control vendors are not taking full advantage of Silverlight's capabilities and producing controls that run in Silverlight but work like an ASP.NET control.
Much of the layout work was hand-coded rather than using designer features.
Blend 3 seems slower than Blend 2 but contains some great features such as SketchFlow.