Reasons Developers Should Consider Microsoft Silverlight for LOB App

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If you’re a cube-dwelling developer in a corporate IT department, chances are slim that you get the opportunity to do anything really cool very often. Microsoft^® Silverlight^TM might just change all that. Below are ten reasons you should consider pushing Silverlight as a viable and essential platform for building line of business applications.

10. Use the tools you already have – Silverlight is really just another tool for your .NET arsenal. Use any .NET language and Visual Studio to build your apps.

9. Be your own designer or cleanly separate design from development – Using Expression Blend, developers can more easily design their own applications. Or, let the professional designers handle the visual side while you focus on what geeks are good at – code. Thanks to the power of XAML, either approach can be effective.

8. Frequent and consistent upgrades – Silverlight has only been around for 4 years and is already through 4 major versions meaning new features are added and improvements are made regularly. Keeping that trend going, Silverlight 5 beta is being released this week with a production release expected in late 2011.

7. Making your application look the same on all platforms requires no extra work – Because Silverlight is platform neutral, you don’t have to worry about designing around the intricacies of different browsers. Can I hear a “Hallelujah!”?!

6. Performance – Silverlight’s just-in-time compiler means applications run significantly faster than AJAX-enabled websites.

5. No more .msi packages to deploy your app! – Deployment of Silverlight applications occurs via the web. All users need to run your application is the Silverlight browser plugin, which can be downloaded and installed in less than a minute.

4. Access system resources and interact easily with the Office Suite – Running applications out of browser allows trusted applications to read from and write to the file system, access serial ports, and interact with desktop apps like the Office Suite.

3. WCF RIA Services means better, more flexible data access – RIA services (requires VS2010 & Silverlight 4) allows you to access application logic on the server from your Silverlight client meaning you don’t have to duplicate it. RIA services can also be used across development platforms so you can write it once and use it in your Silverlight, ASP.NET, and Windows Phone 7 apps.

2. Amazing data visualization – Tools like Deep Zoom and Pivot Viewer offer significant business intelligence capabilities out-of-the-box.

1. End users will love you – Silverlight allows you to give your end users the convenience of a web app and the rich, interactive user experience of a desktop app more quickly and easily.

Have you used Silverlight for line of business applications? We’d love to hear about your experiences.