Using Silverlight for an entire website?

Question

We need to build an administration portal website to support our client/server application. Since we're a .Net shop the obvious traditional way would be to do that in ASP.Net. But Silverlight 2 will be coming out of beta a good while before our release date. Should we consider building the whole website in silverlight instead, with a supporting WCF backend?

The main function of the portal will be: users, groups and permissions configuration; user profile settings configuration; file upload and download for files needed to support the application.

I think the main reason for taking this approach would be that we have good experience with WPF and WCF, but little experience in ASP.Net. Either way we would have to learn ASP.Net or Silverlight, and learning Silverlight seems a more natural extension of our current skills.

Are there any big no-nos from the experience of StackOverflowers? What are the big positives?

Answer 1

I would recommend against building a pure Silverlight site.

Silverlight suffers from the same issues as Flash does: Unintuitive Bookmarking, issues with printing, accessibility issues, not working back buttons and so on.

Also, you would require your users to have Silverlight installed or at least to have the ability to install it.

In controlled environements (eg. in large companies or health care) or on mobile devices, this might not be the case.