exotribe

Here at Configuresoft, we are developing an infrastructure to be used to build our next generation Configuration Intelligence products. We have had lots of internal debates about which UI platform we should use for our future applications - browser or desktop. We've looked at everything from ASP.NET Ajax, Silverlight and Adobe Flex, to Java Swing, WinForms and WPF.

Nearly all of our existing products are browser based applications, and while we love the power that WPF gives us, we are not ready to walk away from the browser application paradigm. We think that Silverlight 2.0 gives us the right combination of browser and rich client that we want. Silverlight allows us to build browser based applications, and run them on both Windows and Linux. Silverlight also gives us a lot of the power that is in WPF and the .NET Framework.

Last month, we demonstrated some early concepts using a WPF desktop client. Since then, we've be working primarily in Silverlight - researching the platform, learning how to share code from our .NET Framework library, and implementing our application framework concepts.

Today we demonstrated our progress to one of our project managers, and our UX designer. We showed them the infrastructure concepts, the xaml, the C# code. They had a lot of good questions about our design, about which concepts are prototypes and which are nearly production, about usability, and about how data moves from our application server to the client.

The big surprise came when we finally launched the prototype application, and walked through the various features we've been working on. The UX guy said "this looks great, but when are you going to be able to show us your Silverlight stuff?"

For me, this one comment validated our decision to move forward with Silverlight 2.0.

Published May 13, 2008

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