With the upcoming 5th version of Silverlight, can we implement a p2p Silverlight OOB application? If so, would it work on both Windows and Mac? Life would be a lot easier with WPF, but I like the fact that SL is not limited to Windows.
P.S. If no OOB is an option, that's even greater.
Nope. No p2p support in SL5 I afraid.
Yes, you can create such an application, but the target host needs to serve a 'socket policy file' on a special port, which makes it difficult in practise (firewalls, etc.)
Related
I am Really confused by reading some articles about Silverlight. Whether I should concentrate on WPF or Silverlight or Both?.
It's like asking Web or Desktop : Which one has upper hand?
Silverlight (Web) and WPF (Desktop) Both are similar. But both have their separate workplaces.
You cannot have a Windows Calculator, Task Manager or MS Word (please don't mention google docs) applications on web like they are on desktop. And same thing applies for web applications.
So, it depends on what platform you want to work on.
I dont think its difference between Web and Desktop. Silverlight is still pretty limited by platform it can run on and still requires some local runing process, even in the sandbox.
I think difference here is features vs availability. WPF can give you features of whole .NET framework, total acess to users's computer and some features that are not available in SL. SL on the other hand allows you to run your app on some different systems (Windows, Mac and there is limited support for Linux-based systems), distribution is much easier thanks to web deployment and whole application can be part of your web ecosystem.
Iam personaly for WPF, but thanks to this whole web and cloud-hype in the last years, SL is getting much more attention from side of MS and developers in general.
Reading these questions and their answers may give you some insight into this:
Definitive source(s) for the difference between Silverlight and WPF
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1254937/wpf-vs-silverlight
What is the difference between WPF and Silverlight?
I totally agree with decyclone, it depends on which platform you want to work. If you have prior experience Asp.net/We applications Silverlight is the way whereas if you have worked in WinForms/Windows applications then WPF is the way to go.
But yes most of the concepts in both SL and WPF are similar; so once you have good understanding of those concepts, you work in either without much problem.
If we ignore the platform then WPF is having the upper hand as WPF is kind of superset of SL.
Have a look at this SO question too -
Learn Silverlight or WPF first?
We were beginning to start on an enterprise application using silverlight.
However after reading this post we doubt whether it is the right choice going forward.
The post says that, according to
Microsoft's declaration in PDC 2010,
Microsoft has changed their strategy
regarding silverlight and they no
longer view it as their technology to
deliver cross platform applications.
Instead they are targeting silverlight
as their development platform for
Windows phone 7.
Is this correct? Should we still continue with silverlight or go back to ASP.NET WebForms\MVC?
The Scope of the application is basically intranet with Windows 2008 servers and Windows XP and Windows 7 clients. However a subset of functionality needs to be available to the external users over the internet. There we cannot have any restrictions on what OS users can use.
based on the info you gave, I can't conclude whether silverlight is the way to go. But what I do know is that a number of Microsofties wrote some blogposts about the things said about Silverlight on the pdc. For example John Papa, Bob Muglia and Scott Guthrie.
Update about the scope
I think you already gave the answer when you described the scope of the application. A part of the application will be available to external users and you cannot have any restriction about the OS they are running. With that requirement I think Silverlight is not the best way to go. Not because the rumours about its future but because of its platform indepency. What are the reasons not to go for a ASP.NET/web solution? Silverlight doesn't work on each OS whereas plain HTML will work everywhere. (ok you need a descent browser)
Although for a good advice I'd need more information about the application.
Basically the question you have to ask yourself is this: do you need your application to be used on every platform, i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux, misc. flavors of Unix, IPhone and other mobile platforms?
If that's the case, then a web based solution is the way to go.
If Windows, Mac and partially Linux is enough, then save yourself and your team a lot of pain and use Silverlight.
In my opinion support for mobile clients is the key factor in your decision.
For sure the right platform for Intranet, Enterprice applications Is Silverlight. It is
stable, performs extreamly well, the environment and the development time is huuge less than web application development, the end User Experience is much better and so on and so forth... Once you want to show part of the system out the the intranet - just create some specific target modules that will address the needed audince. You won't have the universal "Reachfull" solution, that will target everyhing, you'll always need mobile versions or other devices and so on. But once you've built your project the right way with Services (same services that the Silverlight app will consume), it'll be easy job to consume them with new UI.
Hope you will choose Silverlihgt.
Silverlight is a great technology, but the Microsoft does not develop it anymore. So as a technology is a great decision. But if you want to make a Silverlight app usable on a NOT supported platform (e.g. Android or iPhone) you have to use 3rd party services. For example http://sl2html.com
I have been using WPF for a while, and I keep on realizing again and again that Microsoft invests its efforst in Silverlight, not in WPF (RIA Services, default theme, controls and more).
I thought it might be a good idea to migrate to Silverlight (i.e. creating standalone desktop apps with Silverlight 4.0), the question is whether this is possible or not.
BTW, I think LightSwitch applications are generated with Silverlight as standalone desktop apps.
From MSDN:
Silverlight 3 applications are no longer restricted to running in a browser. They can be run in a browser or it they can be detached from the browser and run from the desktop. These out-of-browser applications allow you to bring the richness of Silverlight 3 applications directly to the desktop without the restriction of running within a browser.
Link: Building An Out-of-Browser Client With Silverlight 3
It is possible to create standalone desktop apps(Out of browser apps) with silverlight version 3.0 or higher and it works great. Now it is also possible to install the out of browser app even without opening a browser as shown at this blog post .Silverlight is awesome and silverlight apps even run on MACs and Linux(limited support)
However, it is not true that Microsoft is only investing in silverlight. Microsoft is investing in WPF too. Though it is possible to create out of browser applications with silverlight, they have lot of limitations when compared to a full blown WPF applications.Dont forget that silverlight is just a subset of WPF, for example, silverlight doesnt have ADO.NET, Hardware device access etc. So if your application is merely a business application and you dont have to access hardware devices or database directly then silverlight might be an option, however if your application accessing client machines hardware resources directly then you are better off with WPF.
My suggestion is, If you know before hand that it is going to be a desktop application then go with WPF(or may be even XBAP). In my experience, useful applications grow with time, new features are always requested time to time. If in future,a feature is requested that cannot be accomplished with silverlight and can only be accomplished with WPF, then you will be in a big trouble because you need to rewrite your app in WPF and it will be hard for you to convince your CFO to allocate more fund just to implement one feature. Silverlight is not designed to develop desktop applications, its main goal is multi-platform support.
Silverlight 3 supports Out-of-Browser functionality.
Quote from Wikipedia silverlight page :
Silverlight 3 supports Out-of-Browser experiences, i.e., Silverlight applications can be installed to the system for offline access (provided the application manifest is designed to allow local installation) where they run outside the browser.
Also here is a quick howto
Out of browser applications have the same security restrictions as in browser applications.
With Silverlight 4 you can create full trust applications which have full access to the computer.
More on Network Security Access Restrictions in Silverlight
If you mean Out of Browser apps, certainly. The Seesmic Desktop 2 app is an excellent example of one of these apps, with it's own updating mechanism. Seems a no brainer to use the XAP/MEF plug-in Model and Silverlight in this manner.
Seesmic Desktop 2
We're developing an OOB app along the same lines, one internet download and you're done. You're not going to get exactly the same APIs as you get in WPF, though.
As others have pointed out, Silverlight apps can be installed to run 'out-of-browser', but even with elevated trust they still have significant restrictions on what they can do and certainly don't have "full access to the computer".
Creating an app from scratch, you may want to consider parallel Silverlight & WPF builds. The code can more-or-less be shared by adding the .cs files from one project (e.g. WPF) to the other (Silverlight) using "Add As Link". The XAML files cannot be linked this way and need to be duplicated, but that may not involve much more than copying & pasting, depending on your structure. There're good examples of this on the web.
Developing both types in parallel would likely involve a lot less effort than having to abruptly switch types at some point and discovering incompatibilities/limitations too late.
Silverlight Out of Browser technology and WPF ClickOnce on the surface have similarities. Easy and simple deployment, the ability to specify the level of trust access to the underlying host, etc.
What are the key issues I need to consider when choosing one over the other?
To put a finer point on it, I'll be deploying LOB apps on a corporate network running only windows computers.
The big one is cross platform compatibility. If you need you app to run on a mac as well as windows (not sure if Silverlight is supported in Linux yet) then use Silverligt. If you want to make an assumption that all your users will be in a windows machine then go WPF.
Obviously WPF has a much richer toolkit than silverlight so it may well be that silverlight just isn't an option. If I was just building for windows though I know my job would be easier in WPF.
Given that you are targetting a private infrastructure running Windows, two points worth thinking about
Wpf has a richer control tree, whereas Silverlight is a reduced set for compact size
Wpf requires .Net framework installed locally, whereas Silverlight has its own platform independent browser-based runtime
While your target platform will likely have the latest .Net framework installed, rendering this last point moot, keep in mind any updates to the framework [ie .Net4.0 and any future updates] may require a restart of the machine - which is a major pain point for businesses that demand constant-on stateful desktops [ie anything in finance, like banks and trading].
As with all problems, your requirements, not the technology, should inform your solution. :)
You mentioned trust access to the host which I think rules out Silverlight unless you want to run SL4 (beta).
We recently went through a lot of discussion about file system access. Silverlight 3 runs in a partial trust sandbox more or less. You can't maintain a pointer to files in the files system outside of your application's isolated storage. This was an issue for us as we wanted the user to be able to use the application to reference odds and ends on your file system. That said you can allow the users to load and save files from anywhere on the system but you just get/or push the file stream and (to the best of my knowledge) don't have access to the folder or file path information.
Silverlight 4 (in beta) has support for your application running in full trust mode. I haven't played with this yet however and can't speak to how well it works.
In talking with a lot of people who work with both Silverlight and WPF, even those who are excited about Silverlight and push for it strongly, I hear a lot of the say fairly emphatically that if you are going to be developing exclusively for a full-trust Windows environment, WPF is hands-down the obvious choice.
That's not to say that Silverlight is an inferior product or that there aren't times will Silverlight will be the clear winner. But when you say "I'll be deploying LOB apps on a corporate network running only windows computers," it sounds like WPF is the clear winnder.
You could decide to go down the Silverlight route in anticipation of all of the great new OOB feature os SL4. I've even heard rumors that SL and WPF will eventually merge, so it may not even really matter, right? Well, I think what you'll find if you go with Silverlight is that some of the advanced features that you thought were there weren't there in the way you expected. For example, SL4 will be able to run in "Elevated Trust" (not full trust) and you might find this limiting at a frustrating point in the project where a lot of your code base is already in Silverlight.
Certainly keep your eyes on Silverlight, but for your current business case, WPF will likely be the best fit.
Are ActiveX applets as a technology supported by Microsoft dead?
What are the alternatives to ActiveX to create extremely rich internet applications using Microsoft Technologies? (Silverlight does not cut it for me, as it doesnt give me access to serial ports - or does it?)
You can of course still make ActiveX applications, but know that they will only work with Internet Explorer, unless users of other browsers install hosting plugins, that aren't all that good anyway.
In either case, a web application that requires access to a serial port? Are you sure you're not better off with a desktop application instead? A simple refresh and you've cut off that serial port.
Not all applications belong in the browser.
If you want to launch an application via a web browser that can access the serial ports, one option would be to use Java Web Start with JavaFX as the rich interface API, and Java Communications for the serial port access. You could end up with a cross-platform application at the end as well.
Or just write a native application using your favoured Windows toolkit if you absolutely are restricted to using Microsoft tools.
ActiveX as technology is very much alive, and will remain for many years to come. But its usage for Internet is dead. ActiveX is to be only used from within windows stand-alone applications.
ActiveX as of 2015 is a dead technology that even the maker is no longer interested in continuing to use it. Here is something to read.
No, Silverlight is designed from the ground up to be completely sandboxed, no way to bypasss that (thank god).
If you need that kind of access, but are looking for an easy deployment, I would suggest building a Clickonce application.
There are restrictions, because I think by default they are not full trust, but that's the best you will get.
It's also going to be the only easy route if you need printing (unless you are willing to round-trip to a server to generate a PDF file).
If you need direct access to some hardware (like for a POS software with cash drawer, receipt printer etc), you need to go "desktop". Clickonce can give you some deployment options, XBAPs can give you the "browser experience", but you are going to have to make compromises based on what your "hardware access needs" are.
EDIT:
I didn't notice the Silverlight exclusion in the original question. My comment it not really applicable. Sorry!
I don't know that I would call ActiveX dead just yet, but I would be cautious if you are planning to build an application based upon this technology. My recommendation would be to use Silverlight. This provides much of the functionality that is commonly desired in ActiveX controls, but uses the newer .NET technologies.
There is alot of talk about using Silverlight for media playback, but it has many powerful feature that can also be used to create Line-of-Business applications as well. In fact there is a great podcast episode on DotNetRocks that discusses this exact subject.
Here are a few more links that might point you in the right direction:
Microsoft Silverlight Getting Started
Silverlight 2 and a Glimpse of Silverlight 3 by Scott Guthrie
To the best of my knowledge, Silverlight 4 still doesn't give you direct access to serial ports, but it does give you access to any local web cam and microphones now. You could presumably also run Silverlight 4 out-of-browser, which gives you access to COM objects, and you could write a quick-and-dirty COM object which wrapped serial port access. That said, I also agree with what folks said above about not all applications belonging in the browser.