Silverlight Now

A fairly new technology that has been around for a couple of years now and which I've followed with interest is Microsofts' Silverlight, I've written about it in this blog on more than one occasion. I've long believed that it has the potential to improve the users experience of web applications, in much the same way as Flash has done with rich media.

When version 3 was released last year I thought it had finally started to reach the promise that it had always held. Since then it has gone from strength to strength with it now being installed on over 60% of internet connected computers. It has also been widely adopted by the Microsoft developer community, with many tool vendors now offering Silverlight based products alongside their ASP.Net and Windows controls. Which is great as it means that we have access to a wide range of controls which can extend what can be done beyond the 'in the box' capabilities.

So with all that in mind we decided to use Silverlight in an application that we recently deployed for one of our customers, Charlie Bears. We created an online application that allows their customers to view and change their orders (if they so wish) while also having the capability to lookup details of the current product line up as well as retired products.

Using Silverlight has allowed us greater control of the users experience, from providing nicer animated feedback, to performing complex validation on the client before posting any changes back to the server. We've also made use of the fact that we can cache data within the Silverlight application once it's running, this saves the need for the server to rebuild drop down lists, for instance, which in HTML it has to do everytime a page posts back to the server.