Intro

Most developers and managers are impressed with Silverlight when they first see it, and most are keen see what it can do.  Most see the immediate benefits for rich web based UI, and often there is a comparison drawn with Flash (“Is Silverlight a Flash Killer?”).  However the business case is not always clear to them.

I believe Silverlight offers a tremendous platform for Business Applications

It’s not just the richness of the UI and the wide reach and lower maintenance of the web deployment, but the fact that it is built in managed .net code, with a rich framework that makes many powerful capabilities much easier (threading, isolated storage, wcf services, data binding, linq to name a few)

So this blog will be an exploration of using Silverlight for Enterprise/Business applications. 

Some of the topics I will be exploring (in no particular order)

• User productivity  - can a well design UI improve productivity for the user?
• Silverlight competitors/alternatives  – Ajax, Flash Java FX etc..
• n-tier architecture with Silverlight UI
• Working with data (moving, shaping, binding, validating, paging)
• Services
• Html Interaction
• Where to put your business logic
• Security
• Future directions

To kick things of, take a look at this video from Jamie Cool from the recent PDC – it introduces many of the topics above and also a sneak peak of the next version of Silverlight (code name Alexandria) which provides a richer Business Logic Framework:

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC11/

Cheers

Ian