Is Silverlight Ready to Replace Flash in the Enterprise?

© 2010 WinWire Technologies

Is Silverlight Ready to Replace Flash in the Enterprise? Wired2Win Webinar Series

• Vineet Arora, CTO • Sajjad Nasir, Senior Technical

Architect WinWire Technologies


Agenda

● Quick Background and Evolution

● Silverlight Architecture and Features

● Gartner Report on AJAX and RIA (excerpts)

● Rich Internet Applications (RIA) in Business Scenarios

– Healthcare Insurance Case Study

– Clean Technology (Solar) Case Study

● Key Learnings and Best Practices for Silverlight Applications


Background and Evolution

Embryonic phase

• Desktop.com

• Tech Demonstrations only

Nascent phase

• Backbase, GI, Lazlo systems, Macromedia

• Few products

Early adopter phase

• AJAX – 100+ open source toolkits

• Adobe Flex

Early majority phase

• Enterprises make strategic commitments to RIA

• Server slide extensions to RIA

Platform Centric phase

• Unified client and server centric RIA

• Single RIA vendor

1998 to 2002 2002 to 2004 2004 to 2008 2009 to 2012 Next?


Silverlight Architecture & Features

Ref: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404713(VS.95).aspx

● Cross Browser Cross Platform

Technology

● Small size Runtime (Silverlight 4

runtime is < 6 MB of download)

● Provides Audio and Video

Streaming for different form

factors

(e.g. Mobile devices, Desktops,

720p HDTV video modules)

● Compelling graphics capabilities

● Asynchronous Processing

● Supports out of Browser

Experience


Flash v/s Silverlight: Key Considerations

● Flash has a much bigger Install

base currently. About 97 %

computers have Flash Plug-in*

● Flex AIR as the Dev

environment

● Supports only limited languages

for development e.g. Action

Script, JavaScript

● Limited SEO (Search Engine

Optimization)

● Handles Media content

(Audio/Video) very well

● Silverlight 3 adoption has crossed

40% and Silverlight 4 is nearing

18% *; Fast growth in adoption

rate (last year was 30%)

● Visual Studio as the Dev

environment

● Supports C#, VB.Net, F# etc.. and

a high degree of compatibility

with Middle Tier layers built

using WCF, LINQ

● High SEO, Comparable

Performance and features

Installed

Base

Developer

Environment

Languages

Rich Media

Support

* Source : www.riastats.com

http://www.riastats.com/


Gartner Rates Silverlight as “Strong

Positive"

Overall Rating : Strong Positive ● “Silverlight has recently gained great visibility, has excellent potential and is experiencing strong

growth…Version 4 includes many features for media use such as webcam support, microphone

support, offline DRM and live streaming (including a way to stream to iPhones). Version 4 also

includes more out-of-browser support…all this still in a 5MB download.”

● “Silverlight … features targeted at enterprise line-of-business (LOB) uses such as printing, rich

text (including right-to-left display for those kinds of languages), ... the ability to compile once

and deploy on Silverlight 4 and .NET 4. This will open the door for many uses within

enterprises.”

● “Silverlight continues its march toward providing more and more of the functionality of .NET, full

WPF and Windows. But the difference between Silverlight and WPF is continuing to shrink.

Silverlight 4 even supports multitouch, as well as more-direct hardware access.”

Source: Gartner Report on AJAX and RIA Technologies :

http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/microsoft/vol13/article4/article4.html






RIA - HEALTHCARE INSURANCE CASE STUDY


Business Background and Challenges

Background

• Healthcare Insurance Provider, publicly traded, based in US East coast

• Wanted to automate the process of creating a case file for any life insurance applicant using an electronic questionnaire

• Available as a web application

Challenges

• Questionnaire form needs to be dynamic and update the questions based on previous answers

• e.g. a “Yes” answer to question “ Do you smoke regularly” should prompt the examiner to ask more questions, some question may result in Supplementary Forms, and so on

• High text content visible on screen

• Use of Rich UI with a tree control, Progress bar, Nested Controls etc.

• Security requirements and architecture considerations for internal governance needs


Technology Solution

• Asp.Net + AJAX application to get a more responsive and rich UI

Use a Silverlight based UI

• that provide the display of questionnaire and allow for nesting of questions and other requirements (e.g. adding Supplementary forms etc.)

Create meta data based controls in Silverlight

• Silverlight handles graphics especially Text Graphics quite well and is able to meet the Performance requirements

Text graphics and Silverlight perform well

• to write much cleaner code and utilize Hierarchical Template to display the TreeView etc.

Use Data Binding

• and use the Security mechanism provided by WCF

• To reduce attack Surface provide a wrapper service over WCF Service and host in the same ASP.Net site as that hosting the Silverlight control

Silverlight allows one to invoke WCF Services


Screenshot


Results

● Product helped cut costs by 50% on underwriting a case ● Customer was able to launch product on time, and issued a

press release for the same Ref: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Hooper-Holmes-Introduces-bw-3187643785.html?x=0&.v=1

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Hooper-Holmes-Introduces-bw-3187643785.html?x=0&.v=1












RIA – SOLAR INDUSTRY CASE STUDY


Background and Challenges

Background

• Company is a specialist in efficient Voltage Booster devices and Solar Installations

• Wants to allow customers to be able to monitor their Installation for the Energy/Power produced

Challenges

• The amount of data generated by the Instrumentation is huge. How to effectively do the data transfer over the wire and use it in the display?

• How do we visually represent the different metrics in an efficient way (limitation with all out of box charting controls)

• Performance considerations while designing the display of chart displaying 3 months or more of data


Solution overview

● Use a Silverlight based UI rather an Asp.Net + AJAX application to get a more responsive and rich UI

● Aggregate data at the backend and Use Custom Serialization in Silverlight to reduce the size of the data flowing on the wire

● Custom design a Chart control that is able to scale beyond 10,000 points on the display and allows one to scale seamlessly for different time range using a stretch slider functionality


Data Visualization and Analytics


Data Visualization and Analytics contd…


Results

● A rich Interactive UI completes the Business proposition of the Device vendor (Hardware + Software)

● Monitoring Application provides enhanced visibility into system operation to help with maintenance and long term system performance

Ref: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/09/eiq-energy-

launches-parallel-solar-technology

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/09/eiq-energy-launches-parallel-solar-technology














Key learning - Best Practices

UI Design

Develop

Deploy Performance

Accessibility

Use Layered Architecture with Wrapper Service - enhances security by

reducing the attack

surface and makes the

Silverlight App easy to

maintain

Always use Expression Blend to design the UI

Evaluate using PRISM for the UI Design

(http://compositewpf.codeplex.com)

Enhance Performance by

following specific tips and

tricks – look out for blog

posting after this session

Use ScaleTransform to provide Zoom In-Out features

http://compositewpf.codeplex.com/

http://compositewpf.codeplex.com/