SILVERLIGHT HAS THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE RUNTIME ON THE WEB TODAY. EXPLOIT ALL THE RICHNESS OF THE .NET BASE CLASS LIBRARIES INCLUDING XML, LOCAL STORAGE, INPUT/OUTPUT, GLOBALIZATION AND GENERICS.
The Common Language Runtime (CLR) provides the underlying programming framework within Silverlight 2. It is an efficient industry-strength component which can scale to build complex applications. It is responsible for managing code execution at runtime, and provides core services such as compilation, memory management, thread management, code execution, enforcement of type safety, and code safety verification. Because it provides a managed environment for code execution, the common language runtime enhances developer productivity and contributes to the development of robust applications. .NET is also consistent between server, client and devices.
DEVELOP WEB APPLICATIONS USING YOUR EXISTING .NET SKILLS ON BOTH THE CLIENT AND THE SERVER—THE .NET APIS IN SILVERLIGHT ARE A COMPATIBLE SUBSET OF THE FULL .NET FRAMEWORK. FULL SUPPORT FOR FEATURES SUCH AS LINQ, WCF, AND ADO.NET MAKE IT EVEN EASIER TO BUILD A CLIENT-SERVER APPLICATION.
It can be a lot of work to connect your application to data via web services. In many cases the server is running in a different language than your client, and you need to do a lot of work to stub out methods for each service call.
With Silverlight, it is possible to leverage the consistent programming model that .NET provides across both the server and the client making it is much easier and quicker. Visual Studio has built in support to create a proxy class from web service metadata and use the proxy to communicate with a web service from your silverlight-based application.
Silverlight uses Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and ADO.NET capabilities to create proxies and send SOAP 1.1 messages over HTTP.
The ADO.NET Data Services Framework deploys data in a format that can be useful in the Silverlight development environment. ADO.NET Data Services are deployed to the Internet as representational state transfer (REST) resources addressable by standard HTTP protocol. Data is defined as entities and relationships according to the specifications of the Entity Data Model (EDM). Well known formats, such as JSON, AtomPub, and plain XML are used to represent data for text-based transport in response to the HTTP verbs, GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE.
RAPIDLY ENHANCE EXISTING SHAREPOINT OR ASP.NET SITES INCREMENTALLY BY ADDING SILVERLIGHT COMPONENTS. INTEGRATE HTML AND AJAX WITH .NET USING THE RICH APIS BUILT INTO SILVERLIGHT
It’s easy to add richness to existing Ajax applications and reduce cross-browser inconsistencies. Silverlight blends together Web and video standards and unified media formats for simple integration with existing Web technologies and assets. This means Silverlight works with any back-end Web platform technology and integrates with your existing infrastructure and applications, including Apache, PHP and more on the server, as well as JavaScript, XHTML and others on the client; no “rip and replace” required.
The addition of the .NET Framework to Silverlight not only allows developers to target XAML markup but also lets them target the browser HTML DOM. This not only enables faster and more scalable Web 2.0 sites but also eliminates a substantial part of the testing that is required due to browser differences.
If you are using ASP.NET or SharePoint, you can also get out of the box components which you can plug in to your existing page to add richer functionality. For example, Nintex provides a set of rich charting components in Silverlight that can be placed in a SharePoint page :
Nintex (www.nintex.com) created a series of Silverlight controls hosted within Sharepoint Web Parts. Their reporting UI displays data using Silverlight barcharts, piecharts, tables, etc. This allowed them to keep graphical and tabular information in sync between controls, page through data without requiring round trips back to the server, and allowed users to interact with charts to create intuitive drill-down experiences. The result is a rich, interactive visualization of a great deal of data with sub-second response times.
Nintex wanted rich visualization through graphical representation of data, but they preferred rendering the data inside the browser rather than having the server handle the image generation. They also wanted users to be able to quickly and easily interact with the data they were viewing. When it came to looking at alternatives, Silverlight let us leverage the .NET skills we’d already honed – it just made sense.
The solution was released it in August 2008. Mike Fitzmaurice, VP of Technology reports “The tangible benefit was a 50% reduction time developing the UI compared to AJAX techniques, and probably even more over alternative in-browser environments. It also meant we had a lot less to code on the server, and didn’t have to worry at all about cache management, static image generation, or any of a long list of inelegant, cumbersome byproducts of non-Silverlight approaches. Plus - let’s not lose sight of this – the end result just plain looks great. Users like it. Users understand it.”