Using Silverlight vs asp.net standard controls

Over the past 6 months I've been developing web sites using asp.net. When I design something such as a contact form, 99% of the time I find myself using a script manager and update panels. Recently I tried out sil开发者_高级运维verlight and expression blend, and I love it.

Is there any big cons for me to start building my forms with silverlight instead? The only big one I can think of is the user might not have silverlight and not want to download the plugin.

I guess to solve the has and has not issue, I could make a silverlight version and a standard version until it comes to the point where the plugin is as popular as flash.

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Personally i would advocate doing everything in SL because i love what you can do with it. But common sense dictates otherwise. There is no point replacing relatively static webpages with a SL app. While there are methods to communicate/cooperate between SL apps and the web pages that host them, you don't really want to do this unless you have to, you can end up with quite a kludgy solution.

SL is not suitable for everything. The times you want to use it are when you can redo (or create) a whole web app (or significant chunks of it), and you want to create a more immersive and interactive desktop-like experience for the user. You also need to read up on authentication with SL and WCF services, SL navigation, and become familiar with the SL4 Out of Browser feature as it offers you some features/benefits beyond what is available to an in-broswer SL app.

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The Silverlight plugin is not available in mobile devices. Also, SL 3/4 is not yet 100% supported in Linux.

You really have to take in consideration your targeted audience.

If your app is meant to be used anywhere SL or event Flash is not a good choice. None of them run on iPhones for instance.

The Silverlight platform is a good compromise between the richness of a fat client and the easy of deployment of a web app. Intranet environmentss are great candidates to take advantage of that.

The platform runs well in both Windows and Macs, and should get better in Linux too.