Moving from Silverlight to MVC3

In this post I’d like to explain why we felt the need to abandon our Silverlight development in favor of MVC3.

As some of you may very well know, I’ve been pushing Silverlight within our company from as early as Silverlight 2 Beta 1, back in 2008. Still, this last summer I felt I had to raise the question: Is this still the right technology for our company?

Technology choices are about requirements

When we first chose Silverlight as our UI technology, we came up with a set of requirements. Our application should have a (near) zero footprint on client systems. It should be accessible through the web. Deployment on clients should be effortless or none existent. It should look great without a whole lot of effort. Silverlight checks all these boxes (it still does).

We write summer of 2010. The iPad has been around for several months now and it has been a great success. Smartphones are widely adopted to the point that we predict our customers will get interested in support for platforms like these when using our software.

Another thing we see is people working on more different platforms than before. Was it ok to ask for a certain browser in 2009, in 2010 our customers began to ask for a browser independent UI, not only on Windows, but also on a lot of other platforms.

To see what exactly would be the response of our customers we decided to build a native iPhone application with a limited set of functionality. We started the project early 2011 and published the first Dutch HRM app for any smartphone platform in may. It was a hit, not only because of responses by our clients, but also because of responses by our competitors.

Requirements shift, the world changes

This lead us to conclude that we needed to do something to support a new requirement. Our application, at least in part, should be available on mobile devices and tablets. And we should make sure we could drop the browser requirement we had active, even with our Silverlight 4 UI*.

That is why, during one of our meetings about what to build next, I felt the need to ask “Shouldn’t we move away from Silverlight and adopt ASP.NET MVC3 with HTML5?” It sure was painful, after investing over two and a half years in Silverlight to even suggest dropping it. However I felt then, and I still do, that a change had to be made. After some more debate on the consequences and some research, we are now putting in the effort to build the first parts of an MVC3 UI with the first steps into HTML 5 and CSS 3.

Luckily not all our efforts with Silverlight where in vain. We did deliver a good working product and we are committed to using, expanding and improving the middleware we developed for it. (Do you see the power of a Service Oriented Architecture?).

So is Silverlight really dead now?

Some of you may remember this post. In that post I state that Silverlight is actually the better technology for writing Line Of Business Applications. Even after researching ASP.NET MVC3 and HTML 5 further, I do still believe that, however because of the changes in how people use computers it simply fails to check one box for our customers.

Silverlight is no where near dead. It will still be used in many ways, including new platforms like Windows 8 and, for example Microsoft CRM 2011. Microsoft is integrating Silverlight in more and more of their own platforms. Also with the introduction of Silverlight 5 there will be many cool new features coming to the browser. Therefor I doubt Microsoft will drop Silverlight any time soon.

Consequences for Developers 42

Unfortunately our move away from Silverlight does have some consequences for this blog. First of all, my long running series of posts “Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application has ended with part 41 (which is slightly painful for an obvious reason).

It also means I will no longer be writing posts for SilverlightShow.net. I’d like to use this opportunity to thank Svetla for supporting me for the past years.

And finally, it will also mean a lot less content on Silverlight, but hopefully a lot more content on MVC3, HTML 5, CSS 3, jQuery, etc..

It’s the end of another interesting period in my professional live and the start of a new one. I hope you have enjoyed my articles on Silverlight and I hope to see you around.

 

 

* The IE dependency was not actually caused by Silverlight, but by the integration with the Microsoft Report Viewer we used.

What’s the fuss around Silverlight about?

Since day one of PDC10 there has been a lot of press attention for what appears to be a change in strategy for Microsoft around Silverlight. As I’ve gotten several questions from people concerning the stories published by several respectable sources and how this would impact the business, I decided to write down my take on this.

The PDC10 debacle

So what are people on about? It basically comes down to two things. One is the “lack” of attention for Silverlight on the PDC10. The other is Microsoft announcing that they completely back HTML5. It was elaborated on by saying that there has been a shift in the strategy around platform independent web technology. Also, because there has not been an announcement on Silverlight 5, people are scared into believing there will not be a Silverlight 5.

Most people interpreted this by concluding that Microsoft will limit their investments in Silverlight to the Windows Phone platform. Let’s assume they are right in their conclusion. If that is true, then it’s devastating for all those developers and companies who have invested heavily in Silverlight in the past years.

My analysis on Silverlight

So how do I look at this? Well, there is a number of things I see differently from most people. Let’s have a look at some of those.

HTML5 vs Silverlight

A lot of people see HTML5 and think it replaces Silverlight for the browser completely. Having worked with both HTML4 and Silverlight and having looked into what HTML5 brings to the table so far (it’s not done yet), I have to disagree.

First of all most people that make this statement think of Silverlight as a platform for media and games, similar to Flash. However there is a lot more to Silverlight. For one it is a lot better suited for Line Of Business (LOB) applications. Another major advantage is that everything works and looks exactly the same in different browsers and on the desktop.

Another major advantage about using Silverlight for web developemt is that you can use one programming language across different tiers, complimented by one markup language. Compare that to HTML and you immediately spot the problem. Not only do you need HTML for markup, you need CSS for styling and Javascript for client interaction. To top it all off you need some server side language to work with data. That’s four languages for something that Silverlight does with two languages. Are the decision makers of IT-world paying attention? Less is definitely more in this case.

Because of all this, and a great IDE in the Visual Studio / Blend combination, productivity in Silverlight is much higher and more business logic focused than the classic web application. This allows developers to provide more value more quickly, making more money for the companies and their customers.

But Microsoft has given up on Silverlight, right??

Well, did they? Let’s look at some facts here.

First of all this statement is all based on Microsoft communicating their support for HTML as the only true platform independent technology. People think that this is change in strategy, but in fact it’s not. Let’s face it, that is just reality. The downside on Silverlight is that there is no complete support for all platforms. I’m not only talking about Linux here. It’s also about a lot of mobile platforms. And it’s hardly realistic to expect to get that support for all these platforms. It’s not going to be cost effective to do so. In my book, this statement is stating the obvious and it would be stupid to say anything else.

But will Microsoft stop investing heavily Silverlight because of HTML5? I don’t think so. First of all HTML5 is far from complete. It will take at least another ten years to make it to the main stream in it’s full glory. Second of all HTML5 will have trouble adapting, because it is a global standard and everyone wants to have their say about it. Silverlight doesn’t have this issue.

And then there is the business side of things. Microsoft has invested so heavily in Silverlight, it would not make sense for them to stop now. They have cranked out three major releases of Silverlight in the past two years, including tooling for Visual Studio and support in Blend. They have invested in the Silverlight Toolkit. They brought Silverlight to the Windows Phone platform. And recently they introduced Visual Studio LightSwitch, which can generate complete Silverlight applications. Really, they have hundreds of millions of dollars invested in Silverlight, with great success as a result. And frankly, there is no reason for them to stop doing so, for all of the reasons mentioned before. As long as it keeps selling software for them, they’ll keep working on it.

Conclusion

So we can conclude that Microsoft will not stop pushing Silverlight forward in the foreseeable future. However, it is up to decision makers to stick with the facts and not go with the press buzz, or they will be investing in the wrong technologies, loosing a lot of money in the process. And it’s up to developers to stand by their choice of technology. There really is no need to suddenly change anything.

Just remind yourselves, what made you choose Silverlight as a platform in the first place? Exactly.