I've played some on-line demos of silverlight component packs, like Telerik, NetAdvantage and ComponentOne and although I was very impressed by what I saw, I had also the impression that the demo applications were heavy to load, even during the usage of some components.
I'm planning to try silverlight in a project that demands loading large amounts of data, using grids and charts.
What the guys who use silverlight can say about that?
Is silverlight a good choice for web applications which display large amounts of data and focus on user productivity?
Silverlight isn't superspeedy at displaying large lists of rich data, but then well designed system would not attempt to display large lists of rich data only enough data that a user can make sense of at one time.
Hence silverlight makes an excellent platform for display and entry of data in an engaging manner but you need good design and backend code to really make that happen.
As a Silverlight developer and Internet user, I must say that I prefer HTML when dealing with information I have to scroll.
That's not to say it can't be done right in Silverlight, but I think Silverlight is not immediately equipped to handle "large amounts of data and user productivity"
The short answer is, "Yes, absolutely."
Of course that depends on your audience. Even if you have a spectacular Silverlight package which perfectly displays the data (to you) you should avoid it if your audience will ever include (a) users without Silverlight or (b) tools that weren't designed to consume this such as, depending on your implementation, Google. Encapsulating data in Silverlight or Flash is a great way to make it less accessible.
Related
I'm working on projects that processing a large amount of data, a lot of accouting operations and data reporting, that are shown in grids and pivots.
Currently I use devexpress web controls and everything works fine.
and my question is, will it be Justified if I move to silverlight, can this technology be used for this kind of solutions?
When you write
processing a large amount of data
I assume you mean client side processing, correct? In that case you would see an great boost in processing speed over javascript. You can see an example of that here: Silverlight C# vs Javascript.
That should make your application much more responsive, and with silverlight you could also easily use multithreading to push process heavy operation to the background.
If you're talking about server side processing, then it properly wouldn't be justified to make the move if you already got a working application. Unless you are planning on adding more "flashy" features in Silverlight.
With that being said I'm a big fan of Silverlight, and for a new application I would go with Silverlight. I use it all the time for big B2B web-based applications. Being able to code the frontend in C# over javascript just makes your life a little more enjoyable.
I'm considering using Silverlight for a business type application which will contain probably a dozen or so screens. The screens will contain data entry forms with edit fields, grids, lookups, calendars, etc. Typical business application type screens. I want this to run in the browser but don't want to mess with HTML, JavaScript, CSS etc. Is Silverlight 3 appropriate for this type of application? Can someone build professional level business type apps with Silverlight 3?
#Randy Minder,
Glad to hear that you want to use silverlight 3 for line of business application.
I used to develop line of business applications in ASP.NET combined with javascript/AJAX. I am currently developing my first silverlight 3 line of business application and found silverlight is better in few departments. The following are the Pro/Cons observed by me PERSONALLY.
Pros
Layout/Styling(CSS)
XAML + silverlight 3 styling is very flexible and less cluttered when compared to CSS. I am not a designer and I hate having to deal with CSS. But in the case of silverlight, I really enjoyed creating the mockup,layout & styling. The end result is awesome. This is the first application that I developed has decent & consistent look & feel. I hope you will also find silverlight xaml to be easier to deal with.
Rich Interaction & Language support
I used to use Ajax, javascript for creating rich interaction experiences like populating some data dynamically when user interacts with UI. Writing some complex UI logic in Javascript is daunting. Though there are some nice javascript libraries like Jquery, I think writing UI complex logic in C#/VB.NET/F# is much easier than to write it in javascript. Dealing with rich interactive controls in silverlight is much easier than with javascript/ ajax controls. Writing server communication code with WCF or WCF RIA service is far easier than with ajax calls.
Browser compatibility
Each browser is different from another in one or the other way, like some browser supports something and others dont. Having to deal with browser differences in javascript is also a pain. Silverlight being a plugin doesn't have to deal with browser differences. No problems dealing with layout engine differences too.
Animations/multimedia
Ofcourse with line of business applications we will not use toooo much of animations/multimedia. However we can use small animations like menu popup, sliding controls, fading transitions for when data changes etc. These are very easy to implement in silverlight than with asp.net/javascript
Validation
Validation support in silverlight is awesome you can write more validation logic in less time.
Popup messages
Popup messages are very clumsy to deal in ASP.NET and sometimes I need to store some information in hidden fields to feed text for popup messages. Hidden fields are used as javascript & ASP.NET interaction components which are difficult to maintain and end up with more code.
Good separation of presentation & model
Though you can separate these layers in ASP.NET also, silverlight enforces this by design which is good. In my team there are few developers who dont want to put effort on separation of the layers. Unfortunately they are the seniors in age and decision makers. I always hate to deal with their spaghetti code. Not to say that I am a better developer than them, I always put some effort to separate the concerns and try to learn how to manage my code. ASP.NET webforms doesnt enforce separation of presentation & model by design. Where as silverlight enforces this by design and my life became easier.
Cons
Clipboard
Users are very much used to copy the content available on ASP.NET/HTML page. Most of the silverlight 3 controls doesnt support clipboard out of the box. The only control I know that supports out of the box is textbox.
Database Communication
Database communication in ASP.NET is easier & direct communication is possible. However silverlight being client side technology it doesnt have direct access to database and a necessity of creating an additional tier is mandatory. Though WCF RIA services make the development of this additional tier easier, still WCF RIA services is in beta as of now. Though I am mentioning it as disadvantage, I did not really feel it is as REAL disadvantage because creating a WCF service is not that difficult.
Client side resource usage
Though cost of hardware reduced alot,client side hardware resources are not unlimited when compared to server side. At my work place, though PC provided have decent configuration, most of the users open lot of applications simultaneously which is required to accomplish their day to day tasks. Silverlight uses client side CPU/memory. Some of my users are complaining that the application I developed is using more CPU/memory than the asp.net equivalent. So if your users have slower PCs, consider ASP.NET or design your silverlight application more carefully.
One may say installing silverlight plugin as disadvantage, I did not face the problem because my application is a intranet application and all users installed silverlight with a single email request.
These are MY experiences with silverlight 3. The only major issue I faced was clipboard support in silverlight, I hope MSFT will address this soon.
All in all, silverlight ROCKS!!! Silverlight 3 is ready for enterprise and if you can wait for few more months Silverlight 4 will be released which has even better support for line of business applications. I dont want to develop ASP.NET applications anymore, that doesnt mean that I will quit using ASP.NET, I will use it only when necessary. I fell in love with silverlight and for a good reason. Designing part of the website is the one I used to hate most but with silverlight designing became one of my favorites.
I hope that silverlight 3 will help you in your decision making.
Absolutely. Take a look at this post about the Vancouver Olympics:
http://csharperimage.jeremylikness.com/2010/02/vancouver-olympics-howd-we-do-that.html
That's just one example of a business application in the "real world" being used to drive a massively complex operation. I posted that just to draw attention to the "business" side of Silverlight, but be sure to click the link to the original post to see the other partners and contributions to the project.
I've been building enterprise/business applications with Silverlight for over a year now. So the answer is an emphatic "Yes, you can" and "Yes, it's been done" and "Yes, it's been done on a large scale with large companies, and very successfully."
I agree #Jeremy. Make sure to use RIA Services with Silverlight , You will get a very manageable/maintainable application. Even one more benefit is that you can make the SL app Out of browser too.
I’m currently involved in the design of a prototype Silverlight 3 application used by call centre operators in an enterprise who take queries via phone and email. The intention of the prototype is to demonstrate how Silverlight can be used to improve the UX and overcome some of the hurdles of using ASP.NET webforms in a high latency environment. I won’t go into the details of the environment or the rationale of Silverlight 3 vs 2 or WPF, this question is about usability;
I’m looking for examples of good user interface design suitable for the above requirement that highlight some of the benefits of Silverlight. It’s a prototype so it can be a bit sexier than your usual enterprise app and have a few more bells and whistles than you’d usually get from user requirements. The goal is to both provide something functional and introduce the “wow” factor. Appreciate any resources or examples you can think of.
You've got a stateful client - one of the interesting things to do is leverage that state.
For example:
Task centric UI with multiple active tasks.
Each task represents a process/workflow that has begun, but not yet completed. Especially useful in scenarios where ther are interrupts.
Auto-save drafts to local isolated storage in case the app restarts, browser closes etc. Any partially filled forms can be restored when the app is re-launched.
The other thing is context... or preserving context of the task at hand. For example, if you want to do a lookup, you can popup a dialog, rather than navigate away from the current page.
Just some quick ideas...
Have you seen http://quince.infragistics.com? Although not specific to Silverlight it's full of proven UI methods - not Infragistics specific!
I find it very useful when designing forms and controls, maybe you will find some good suggestions there.
I like the way it encourages (forces) all your service calls to be asynchronous. From the UX point of view it means that your form is not locked up while performing a potentially laggy operation.
Animations are nice too. While they're often considered useless fluff, they can reduce the amount of surprise the user experiences when something suddenly changes. They can also be used to draw attention in a more subtle way that a messagebox in the face.
i have played around with dynamic data website. is there something similar for winforms.
if there isn't anything out there for doing the same with winforms than the question would be why not? we have a massive ERP application that we want to migrate from AS400 to .Net
Winform application. my initial thoughts were to have all the maintenances be as simple as Dynamic Data Website project.
I would think that WPF would be a better starting point then WinForms, as it has support for style to say how item of data are displayed.
Dynamic Data makes it easy to edit your DB on the web. For desktop (and web) apps take a look at the new Microsoft LightSwitch:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lightswitch/gg441300
LightSwitch doesn't use Windows Forms. Rather it creates a Silverlight App that can run both on the desktop and the web. Pretty cool.
Dynamic data is using the routing functionality of the MVC framework. In Windows forms we don't have this approach of fetching data with URLs from a server.
I am not sure how this model could fit into Windows forms.
I think it's pretty hard to create something like dynamic data for Windows Forms.
My biggest concern is here, once you created that Framework, how do you configure it? I mean if you want to change 1 form to be a bit different than the others :-)
I think its better to generate Forms for the various tables in the Database context, using a powerful Grid control from one of the big vendors. And then you can configure those.
Remember this is a different approach then the dynamic data one, where no code is generated before compile time
I think the reason you don't see something like this in winform applications is because it's much easier to store a HTML page inside a database and then display it on the screen formatted properly when using a web application because your browser knows how to format the HTML.
You would have to, stored in the database, know where each label and field would go on the form in some sort of co-ordinates fashion (or you could use a layout 3rd party control) but the amount of work that would take might be tedious to do properly.
The dynamic data website I worked on did not take input from the user. It only displayed different web pages to the user and allowed the admin person to easily make changes to the content. If you wanted a user to beable to save data then that would even be more complex because you have to worry about validation, required fields, etc.
If you have lots of users that need to see different information based on their access level then I would just suggest having a table in the database that tells the system whether or not they should see the field on the form. Then use a 3rd party layout panel to format the visible fields.
my 2 cents
As much as Dynamic Data looks simple and cheap enough to access a database it wouldn't work for an ERP system anyways. Business systems are more than moving data between database and the user interface, they require business rule actions when saving data and while retrieving the may require some massaging to ensure meaningful presentation of storage optimized data.
If you still like to pursue this option it would be very easy to create an application that is build on top of Entity Framework.
I'm not aware of a Dynamic-Data-alike, but (having written one before, years ago, for ASP) I don't actually think it would be that hard, particularly with WPF and its templating support.
Actually if you were really clever you could probably 'borrow' the backend from Dynamic Data, and just reimplement the UI as WPF.
Would make a fun little project actually.
Alternative answer: Use Microsoft Access. No really.
Alternative answer #2: So why not just use Dynamic Data then?
Since the launch of Silverlight 2 I was expecting a lot of full blown Silverlight applications popping up but still there seem to be little evidence of this. Does anybody know of such applications out there in the wild. And also what would be the obvious applications you would develop in Silverlight. I would say mail clients are bad examples as they just as well could be written as a web/ajax app. As Silverlight is far more powerful than web+ajax possible candidates should be impossible/akward implementing as a web/ajax app.
The ones that comes to my mind is
Photo and imaging editing apps
Reporting applications
Office applications, Word/Excel...
Edit:
Added from posts
Games
The point isn't that the app need to fill the whole screen just that it isn't just a small part of a webpage, or you could call it a full blown application running inside the webbrowser, only using the webbrowser as a host.
I think the Medical app that Microsoft itself developed shows pretty well what could be achieved with silverlight http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/
As for image editing then as I understand its a bit difficult as Silverlight lacks a Bitmap API to be able to do per pixel image editing...
Edit:
I noticed you added Word/Excel to your question and there comes the problem that Silverlight doesn't have a rich text editor built in and there hasn't been real good examples of custom implementations. There is one http://www.codeplex.com/richtextedit but I haven't seen any applications that actually use it.
I'm working on one in the medical domain.
This started as an update of a Mac classic application but due to the amount of work involved, broadened to considering other toolkits. I convinced them to go for an initial WPF desktop port to be followed by a Silverlight version.
I don't know one so far, but I could imagine that it could be used in a kind like the fullscreen video playback on youtube.
How many fullscreen desktop apps are there? Most application don't need the entire screen. If you don't want to be distracted by menus and taskbars and so you go fullscreen. Another type of applications that can use fullscreen are games.
You are limited in fullscreen to certain key presses such as arrow keys, tab, enter, and space so this rules out some of those types of apps. They have done this for security reasons so an app can't hijack the screen and record the keypresses, but I wish they could come up with a scheme to sufficiently warn the user then allow it if they consent.
An application Microsoft seem to like to show case is the AOL mail client written entirely in silverlight.
Personally I follow the rule is if you would not write it in flash you would not write it in silverlight preferring AJAX in most cases. In the past most large flash application have failed such as the flash word processor (cant remember the name) while AJAX enabled applications such as google documents have taken off.
Finally I believe until moonlight (linux and mac support) has been released and more general users have silverlight downloaded developers will be reluctant to use it widely even for smaller apps and gadgets.