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Moving from Silverlight to MVC3

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20 Sep 2011CPOL4 min read 23.6K   3   2
Why we felt the need to abandon our Silverlight development in favor of MVC3

In this post, I’d like to explain why we felt the need to abandon our Silverlight development in favor of MVC3.

As some of you may very well know, I’ve been pushing Silverlight within our company from as early as Silverlight 2 Beta 1, back in 2008. Still, this last summer I felt I had to raise the question: Is this still the right technology for our company?

Technology Choices Are About Requirements

When we first chose Silverlight as our UI technology, we came up with a set of requirements. Our application should have a (near) zero footprint on client systems. It should be accessible through the web. Deployment on clients should be effortless or none existent. It should look great without a whole lot of effort. Silverlight checks all these boxes (it still does).

We write summer of 2010. The iPad has been around for several months now and it has been a great success. Smartphones are widely adopted to the point that we predict our customers will get interested in support for platforms like these when using our software.

Another thing we see is people working on more different platforms than before. Was it ok to ask for a certain browser in 2009, in 2010 our customers began to ask for a browser independent UI, not only on Windows, but also on a lot of other platforms.

To see what exactly the response of our customers would be, we decided to build a native iPhone application with a limited set of functionality. We started the project early 2011 and published the first Dutch HRM app for any smartphone platform in may. It was a hit, not only because of responses by our clients, but also because of responses by our competitors.

Requirements Shift, The World Changes

This lead us to conclude that we needed to do something to support a new requirement. Our application, at least in part, should be available on mobile devices and tablets. And we should make sure we could drop the browser requirement we had active, even with our Silverlight 4 UI*.

That is why, during one of our meetings about what to build next, I felt the need to ask “Shouldn’t we move away from Silverlight and adopt ASP.NET MVC3 with HTML5?” It sure was painful, after investing over two and a half years in Silverlight to even suggest dropping it. However I felt then, and I still do, that a change had to be made. After some more debate on the consequences and some research, we are now putting in the effort to build the first parts of an MVC3 UI with the first steps into HTML 5 and CSS 3.

Luckily, not all our efforts with Silverlight were in vain. We did deliver a good working product and we are committed to using, expanding and improving the middleware we developed for it. (Do you see the power of a Service Oriented Architecture?).

So Is Silverlight Really Dead Now?

Some of you may remember this post. In that post, I state that Silverlight is actually the better technology for writing Line Of Business Applications. Even after researching ASP.NET MVC3 and HTML 5 further, I do still believe that, however because of the changes in how people use computers, it simply fails to check one box for our customers.

Silverlight is nowhere near dead. It will still be used in many ways, including new platforms like Windows 8 and, for example Microsoft CRM 2011. Microsoft is integrating Silverlight in more and more of their own platforms. Also with the introduction of Silverlight 5, there will be many cool new features coming to the browser. Therefore, I doubt Microsoft will drop Silverlight anytime soon.

Consequences for Developers 42

Unfortunately, our move away from Silverlight does have some consequences for this blog. First of all, my long running series of posts “Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application has ended with part 41 (which is slightly painful for an obvious reason).

It also means I will no longer be writing posts for SilverlightShow.net. I’d like to use this opportunity to thank Svetla for supporting me for the past years.

And finally, it will also mean a lot less content on Silverlight, but hopefully a lot more content on MVC3, HTML 5, CSS 3, jQuery, etc.

It’s the end of another interesting period in my professional live and the start of a new one. I hope you have enjoyed my articles on Silverlight and I hope to see you around.

* The Internet Explorer dependency was not actually caused by Silverlight, but by the integration with the Microsoft Report Viewer we used.


License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)


Written By
Software Developer (Senior) KnowledgePlaza
Netherlands Netherlands
Since early 2001 I've been working full time as a software developer and since 2004 I've been working mostly with Microsoft technology.
I started out as a product developer, but after a few years I switched to a project company where my roles ranged from developer up to consultant and from team lead and coach to manager.
Eventually I switched jobs and focused on the consultant part and then I got back to building a product once again. Now I work in a job where I get to do both.

Comments and Discussions

 
QuestionAnd why you decided to use MVC? Pin
sip_slava26-Sep-11 10:27
sip_slava26-Sep-11 10:27 
AnswerRe: And why you decided to use MVC? Pin
mrjvdveen26-Sep-11 20:24
professionalmrjvdveen26-Sep-11 20:24 

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