Silverlight; the good, the bad or the ugly?

Question

I've recently started a new project, and we plan to create this in Silverlight. We do want to develop it as a RIA, and based on previous experience with other .Net technologies (such as WPF) Silverlight feels like the right choice.

Silverlight has been around for some years now, and as version 3 is out I assume - and got the impression - that it is really getting settled as a stable platform that's gonna be around for a good while. However, I still see people complaining about Silverlight - saying it is bad technology that should never have been released. I'm getting the impression that these complainers often don't have any real experience with Silverlight.. Often based on a general skepticism towards Microsoft. And; I get it from non-Windows people saying; "well, if you're creating this is Silverlight that leaves me out of using it", but I thought Moonlight would solve that issue?..

So; is the skepticism towards Silverlight deserved, or has Silverlight become a good platform which we without fright can develop our new project on?

Answer 1

The problem with silverlight is penetration. The vast vast majority of users already have some form of Flash installed (98%+), wheras only a tiny proportion of users will have Silverlight installed (about 20% off-the-cuff). EDIT: http://riastats.com/ and http://www.statowl.com/custom_ria_market_penetration.php now have Silverlight penetration at around 40-50%. Other sources claim it's as high as 60% in some parts of the world - particularly the UK.

Ask yourself: What's my audience? Are they likely to already have Silverlight installed? Can I get it installed as part of a standard build (corporate)? If they see a "download silverlight now!" popup on my site, will they download silverlight, or will they look for a competing application that works with what they already have?

Now, from a development viewpoint, by all accounts Silverlight is wonderful.

Why would you use it over an alternative? If you've got shared components, if you're re-using code from another .NET app, if you've got internal .NET experience and no experience with the alternatives. Those are all good reasons to use Silverlight.

I suspect it's here to stay, and it will become more widespread with time. So, weigh up the good and the bad, and that'll tell you whether or not Silverlight is the right choice for you.

Answer 2

It appears you have a misconception about Silverlight's multiplatform support. Silverlight is officially supported on Windows (IE and Firefox) and OSX (Safari and Firefox).

Moonlight is only required for linux and, as Iain mentioned, lags behind the official implementation.