Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 3 – Pros and Cons

by dwahlin via Dan Wahlin's WebLog on 8/18/2009 7:06:00 AM

I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about how Silverlight 3 can or can’t do various things lately throughout the blogosphere and Twitter.  The sad part is that some of the people giving their two cents about what Silverlight can’t do haven’t built a “real world” application so I’m not sure how their opinion carries any weight (I know because I’ve asked a few of them). Their list of cons are typically based on what they heard on Twitter or various rumors floating around.  As with any technology there are pros and cons and Silverlight is no exception.  The goal of this post is to talk through some of the pros and cons I’ve personally encountered while building a “real world”, enterprise-scale timesheet and job management application for a large electrical contracting company.  I’ll point out what has worked really well and what hasn’t so that people looking to move applications to Silverlight 3 can get an honest assessment on what can be done and what can’t be done.

The application my company is building has a lot of different screens (30+), integrates with the backend database using WCF, uses reporting services for reports and leverages many of the key features Silverlight 3 has to offer.  The existing application used by the client was written using Access Forms and is being ported to Silverlight 3 along with a bunch of new functionality.

Let’s start by going through what I personally feel are the pros and cons that Silverlight brings to the table for Line of Business (LOB) applications.

Silverlight 3 Pros

Here are some of the pros I’ve found as I’ve worked through the application:

1. Excellent data binding support – my favorite feature.  This changes how you look at building applications and allows you to write data-centric code instead of control-centric code as with normal Web applications.  There’s a lot I could cover here but I wrote up a post awhile back that gives additional details about what I like.  Read it here.
2. Server code and client code can written in the same language.  Business and validation rules can be shared between the client and server code base which definitely makes applications more maintainable into the future.
3. A rich set of controls – I really like the controls available with the Silverlight SDK as well as those in the Silverlight toolkit.  There are a few (mentioned below) that can test your patience when you’re building a more involved application and not a simple demo.
4. Support for just about any type of animation or effect you want.  Don’t need that in a LOB app?  I beg to differ.  You can get quite creative with how data is displayed with Silverlight and not be limited to simple slide, sizing or opacity animations.  I’ll show an example of what I call the “card flow” interface later in this post and show how it allows managers to get to timecards faster and easier than before.
5. Excellent designer support through Expression Blend 3 – Visual Studio 2008 is great for coding but doesn’t provide any design-time features for Silverlight 3.  Not a big deal….you can use Expression Blend 3 which provides a great interface for designing your applications.  The new SketchFlow application can even be used to prototype applications upfront and get customer feedback more quickly and easily than in the past.
6. Easy to integrate distributed data using WCF, ASMX, REST, ADO.NET Data Services, .NET RIA Services, etc.  The application that I’m working on leverages WCF as well as some dynamic code on the client-side to make calls to the service.  It works great and FaultExceptions can even be handled now with Silverlight 3.
7. Desktop-style application with a web deployment model – Get the responsiveness of a desktop application that can be deployed right through the browser and even run on Macs.
8. Support for styling of controls.  Silverlight 3 now allows styles to be changed on the fly and styles to be based on other styles.  If you don’t like how a control currently looks you can completely change it by using styles and control templates. 
9. Out of browser support – This was a key reason why my client choose Silverlight 3.  They have a lot of remote workers that don’t always have access to the Internet and needed to be able to enter timesheets even when disconnected and then sync them later once a given employee has connectivity.
10. Support for behaviors.  Behaviors are very, very useful in Silverlight applications.  I needed to add mouse wheel scroll capabilities to a ScrollViewer control to simplify scrolling in a screen and did it within minutes by using a behavior (thanks to Andrea Boschin who created the behavior).
11. Manipulate pixels using WriteableBitmap.  This can be used to create some very cool effects (some which may not be applicable to LOB applications…but they’re still cool).  I’m using it mainly to fill the printing hole mentioned below.
12. Support for storing local data through isolated storage – By using isolated storage you can cache data, store data when no network connectivity is available plus more.
13. Support for navigation – Silverlight 3 has a new navigation application template in Visual Studio that makes creating an application with multiple pages quite easy.  Each “page” can be linked to directly through deep linking and has built-in support for history.  If the client hits the back or forward button in the browser they’re taken to the appropriate Silverlight application page.  The navigation framework allows code to be placed into separate pages (or user controls) and then loaded as a particular link or menu item is clicked.  It’s a great feature that can really reduce the amount of code you have to write especially compared to Silverlight 2.

Silverlight 3 Cons

So everything’s all peachy right? Both the client and I are very happy with how things are going with the application but there have been some challenges along the way.  At the beginning of this post I said I’d mention the cons as well and I’m going to be brutally honest here with some of the areas where Silverlight 3 is missing the mark when it comes to Line of Business applications.

1. No printing support.  Microsoft is working hard on this for future versions of Silverlight but if you can’t wait until then it’s definitely something to be aware of.  We knew about this going into the project so it was supposed to be a non issue since we could pop-up HTML overlays or open new browser windows that could be printed.  But, for one particular screen the lack of printing support is proving to be a challenge since it turns out the end user always prints the screen as they’re doing payroll work and the screen is quite complex.  I’ve come up with a work around using Silverlight 3’s WriteableBitmap but am currently sending bytes up to the server, converting them into a JPEG and then displaying the image in the browser.  Definitely a hack solution.  We’re now looking at generating dynamic Excel files on the fly at the client with a snapshot image of the Silverlight data since Excel will print the image properly and the browser doesn’t (still researching this option). If that doesn’t work we’ll just use reporting services to generate the same screen…not my preference though.
2. Binding data to controls such as a ComboBox that is nested in other controls is harder than it should be.  I use a lot of ComboBox controls that are nested in DataGrid or ListBox rows in the application.  While I have it working fine now (after beating my head against the monitor a few times), the ComboBox control itself really needs a SelectedValue and ValueMember property for some situations and a way to more easily bind its ItemsSource to collections that may be defined outside of the current DataContext. All of this can be done via code but if you want to handle the majority of it declaratively in XAML it can be challenging in some cases especially once you start breaking parts of a page into user controls.  I ended up enhancing some code Rocky Lhotka blogged about and created my own ComboBox control that simplifies things a lot.
3. Lack of built-in support for commanding.  What’s “commanding”?  In a nutshell it’s the ability to call a method within an object directly from XAML as an event fires instead of going through a code-behind file.  For example, when a button is clicked the click event can call directly into a ViewModel object that acts on the event.  By using commanding you can make your applications more testable. Frameworks such as Prism (and many others that have popped up) support simple button commanding and provide a code framework that can be used to build other types of commands.  The application I’m working on handles just about every event in the book (click, mouseenter, mouseleave, rowloaded, lostfocus, gotfocus, plus others) though and writing custom code just to handle events got old (so we simplified things and handle the event in the code-behind which notifies the ViewModel via events).  If you want to handle events directly in the code-behind file this is a non-issue for you, but if you want to handle them in another class it can be more challenging than it should be.
4. Learning curve – There is certainly a learning curve associated with building Silverlight applications especially if you’re coming from building standard Web applications.  However, I think that’s the case with any technology.  I had already built several demo applications with Silverlight, co-authored a book and several articles on it and still ran into a few challenges with architecture choices along the way (we’re following the MVVM pattern).  I think it boils down to experience though so I list this one simply so that people know they will spend some time learning.  If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like to learn new things then Silverlight probably isn’t for you.  If you enjoy learning new things then I think you’ll love Silverlight once you get the hang of it.
5. No built-in support for displaying Reporting Services reports within Silverlight – This isn’t a huge issue in my opinion since a report can be brought up in a separate browser window or displayed using an HTML overlay.  However, if you need to display the report directly in Silverlight there isn’t any built-in way to do that in Silverlight 3.  3rd party vendors to the rescue though.  Perpetuum Software now has a product that can integrate reports directly into Silverlight.
6. The client has to have the Silverlight plugin installed.  I personally don’t view this as much of a con for internal enterprise LOB applications since it’s fairly easy for a PC manager to push out Silverlight to client PCs in many environments.  If the application will be run externally then installation of the plugin on each client has to be considered though.
7. Sharing service types between proxy objects needs to be enhanced - When the project was initially started I wanted to use ADO.NET Data Services for some things and WCF for others.  The problem is that if both types of services reference the same type (such as Customer) then both generated proxy objects will contain a copy of that type which ultimately bloats the XAP size and leads to having to reference types by namespace down in the code versus a using statement at the top.  Although proxies can share code libraries from other projects (that's an option in the proxy generation wizard), my Model entities use .NET language features not available in Silverlight class libraries so type sharing won't work there.  It's something to keep in mind as you decide how you'll get data into your application.
   

There are definitely more pros than I’ve listed and probably a few more cons although I honestly can’t think of many more that I’ve had to deal with.  The bottom line is that all of the pieces are there (aside from printing) to build powerful Line of Business applications that are built using existing .NET languages.  You can make the applications look however you’d like and not have to worry if they’ll look good across different browsers.  Here’s a picture of a payroll screen in the early stages of development:

Here’s what the screen looks like after applying a few styles to the controls and adding support for things like inline editing of data:

Some of the more “fun” features in Silverlight 3 can also be put to good use in Line of Business applications.  I needed to create a way for warehouse managers to easily manage multiple time cards for employees.  I ended up going with what I call a “card flow” interface (similar to cover flow in iTunes) to display the time cards.  The end user can use the mouse wheel to quickly navigate through different cards.  The selected card will slide to the middle with a cool animation and the others are angled using perspective 3D.  Here’s what the “card flow” interface looks like (I need to give credit to Jose Fajardo for blogging about the concept):

To Wrap It Up

So is Silverlight 3 ready for prime time, enterprise level Line of Business applications?  Having worked with the framework nearly every day for the past 3 months in a “real world” scenario my short answer is a big “YES”!  I don’t say this because I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid though.  Anyone who knows me understands that I use what I feel works best for a given application (unless the client wants something specific of course).  I truly enjoy working with the framework and think it can do a lot of powerful things.

Every company is unique though so the answer really depends on what features your application needs.  Our previous client’s application was built using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery and it did everything they wanted it to do (I really like ASP.NET MVC and jQuery by the way).  However, Silverlight provides a more consistent way to develop enterprise applications that doesn’t require learning JavaScript, additional libraries like jQuery, CSS, HTML and other Web technologies.  With Silverlight you can write code using your favorite .NET language on both the client and server, debug applications like any normal .NET application, bind data in flexible ways, retrieve data from remote services, animate objects as needed, round corners and work with gradients without ever creating a .gif, .jpg or .png and have a ton of controls right at your finger tips.  I’m a big fan.

For more information about onsite, online and video training, mentoring and consulting solutions for .NET, SharePoint or Silverlight please visit http://www.thewahlingroup.com.