OK, even if Silverlight isn’t completely dead, it certainly is starting to smell pretty bad. Mid last year we were looking at Silverlight as being a viable solution for our UI needs. It has a rich programming model. The user experience is excellent and it has pretty decent market penetration – certainly not as good as Flash, but respectable.
However, as the majority of our development is greenfield and we are looking to build for the future, it just didn’t make long term sense for us to consider building on a product whose future was looking pretty iffy. When you consider that Microsoft recently cancelled Mix 2012, it’s clear to me that the future lies elsewhere.
Sure, you can still build on Silverlight. And sure it will be supported for quite some time to come. But I asked myself why build on a technology that is clearly questionable in its future? Certainly Microsoft is continuing to support XAML development for Metro style applications. But I questioned whether I was just delaying the inevitable.
In the end, I felt the best decision was to go with HTML5 for the applications we are building for the future. We have begun active development in ASP.NET MVC3 with the Razor view engine. We have achieved our goals of providing a rich user experience, excellent performance, and a testable loosely-coupled code base. It’s also a solution we can work with right now, which means we can deliver business value right away without sacrificing functionality.
v.Next of our applications will give us the opportunity to revisit the scene and reevaluate the options. I think the best news is that there is an excellent set of options out there now and the future looks very bright indeed.
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