If you read this, chances are that you are a developer and that you like Silverlight. And why not? Exciting platform, great features, outstanding tooling. But! If you’re a corporate developer, have you sold it to your management yet? If not, this post is for you.
Silverlight is for RIA, and the domain of RIA applications is largely intranet or closed/controlled extranet user groups. This again is what is usually found in larger enterprise companies. Companies that usually have a vested interest in controlling their environment. And in terms of bringing software into production and of operations and maintenance afterwards, every new platform is one platform to many.
So, the odd developer comes along and talks about this great new technology. Does the management care? Probably not. What does it care about? Simple. Money! Money, as in costs for deployment and user support, hardware and licenses to get the stuff up and running, operations and developer training, maintenance. And money as in savings in the respective areas and – the cornerstone, as the business usually pays the bill – impact on the business. All usually subsumed under the term ROI.
About a year ago, I finished an analysis looking into RIA with Silverlight, conducted for a major customer. Not from the point of view of the developer, but that of business people, operations, and IT management:
So, let’s look briefly at each aspect…
User/Business perspective…
The business doesn’t exactly care for the platform Silverlight itself; it cares for its business benefits. Benefits as in improved user experience, streamlined business workflows, office integration, and so on. And since we had some lighthouse projects with Silverlight we were able to collect some customers’ voices:
“This [streamlining with Silverlight] would reduce a […] business process […] from ~10 min to less than a minute.”
“Advanced user experience of Silverlight UI helps raising acceptance of new CRM system in business units”
“I was very impressed of the prototype implementation […] with Silverlight 3. Having analyzed the benefits of this technology I came to the conclusion that I want the […] development team to start using Silverlight as soon as possible. […]”
This is also confirmed by the typical research companies, like Gartner or Forrester:
“Firms that measure the business impact of their RIAs say that rich applications meet or exceed their goals” (Forrester)
Operations perspective…
In production, the benefit of Silverlight applications (compared with respective conventional web based applications) is reduced server and network utilization.
For example, we had a (small but none-trivial) reference application at our disposal, which was implemented in ASP.NET as well as Silverlight (as part of an analysis to check the feasibility of Silverlight for LOB applications). We measured a particular use case with both implementations – starting the application and going through 10 steps, including navigation, searches, and selections. Both applications were used after a warm-up phase, meaning that the .xap file, as well as images and other static files had already been cached.
The particular numbers don’t matter, what matters is the difference between the amount of data that has been exchanged for each step (in case of navigations none at all for Silverlight). For the single steps:
And accumulated over time:
A ratio of roughly a tenth of the network utilization is quite some achievement – considering that the Silverlight application wasn’t even optimized to use local session state and caching, it should be even higher.
This should have a direct impact on the number of machines you need in your web farm. Add the fact that session state management on the client drastically reduces the demand for ASP.NET session state – usually realized with a SQL Server (Cluster) – there is yet another entry on the savings list.
On the down side is the deployment of the Silverlight plugin. For managed clients – especially if outsourcing the infrastructure comes into play – this may very well become a showstopper.
IT Management perspective…
With respect to development and maintenance, what IT Management should care about includes things like ability to deliver the business demands, development productivity, bug rates in production, costs for developer training, and so on.
Actually all areas in which Silverlight can shine, compared with other RIA technologies, and with the typical mix of web technologies as well:
- Rich, consistent, homogenous platform
- .NET Framework (client and server), Visual Studio, Debugger, C#
- Reduced technology mix, less technology gaps, less broad skill demands
- Improved code correctness and quality…
- compiler checks, unit testing, code coverage, debugging, static code analysis, in-source-documentation, …
- Improved architecture and code
- Clean concepts, coding patterns, clear separation of client code, lead to better architectures
- Powerful abstractions lead to less code (up to 50% in one project), less complexity, less errors
Customers’ voices in this area:
“between our desktop app and the website, we estimate 50% re-use of code”
“a .NET developer can pretty much be dropped into a SL project. […] This is a huge deal […]”
“As alternative for Silverlight we considered Flash. […] only Silverlight could provide a consistent development platform (.NET/C#). […]”
Conclusion…
Taking all this together, and considering that enterprise companies usually have the tooling and test environments (well…) readily available, this all adds up to something like the following bill:
Whether the bill looks the same for your company or for one particular project, of course, depends on many things. Especially nowadays with all the hubbub around HTML5 and mobile applications (without any relevant Silverlight support). But if RIA is what you need, the Silverlight will quite often yield far more benefits than any other option.
Still, you need to do your own evaluation. However, I hope to have given you some hints on what you might focus on, if you want to sell technology to the people who make platform decisions in your company.
The actual analysis was fairly detailed and customer specific. But we also prepared a neutralized/anonymized version, which we just made available for download (pdf). (Also directly at SDX.)
That’s all for now folks,
AJ.NET
AJ's blog 
Leave a Reply