Just to add my 2c, it's not necessarily an "or" choice. You could build 90% of the app as a web app (which for webby-things, will be much faster - Silverlight/XAML has nothing on Razor/MVC/HTML/CSS). Then if you hit something that's difficult to do in pure HTML/JS, build that 10% in Silverlight.
Personally, given the power of JS and modern browsers, I'd find it pretty hard to justify using Silverlight for anything web/intranet. The only good case I've seen is where we some C# classes and needed to use them on the server and client, and there was no nice way to convert the code to JavaScript (though I wonder if expression trees in .NET 4.0 could have helped there). Even then, doing it over, having UI in HTML and using JavaScript/SL interop might have worked better. Paul From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of James Chapman-Smith Sent: Tuesday, 29 March 2011 12:32 PM To: 'ozDotNet' Subject: HTML vs Silverlight - comparative effort? Hi folks, I got asked a question today that I don't really have the experience to answer and was hoping someone here could help. If I'm going to develop a new "web-based" application in HTML or Silverlight, what would the comparative effort be like? And really, what kind of pros & cons are worth evaluating? By HTML I am thinking ASP.NET MVC, but it could be something else ".NET"-ish. Cheers. James.
