I am trying to evaluate whether we should migrate from developing our product in ASP.net web forms (current technology) to Silverlight. I remember reading that silverlight development can add to development speed, so this is the main driver for me to think about this.
I am assuming that business logic development will take same amount of time, I am open to it if UI development speed will bring in significant benefits.
The App we have is a line of business data driven app. There are very few rich reports required, however the printable data reports need a lot of formatting (since the app is highly configurable in terms of data setup; for eg which columns have a merged header and then sub headers, which cells to show data in red, etc). Apart from this most of the UI is Asp.net webfrms for entering data.
Do you see any significant improvement we can achieve by moving to silverlight? We also need to consider time to migrate existing UI and the learning curve, but if that were not a constraint, what would be your view?
I could see you gaining a lot using Silverlight, especially with the awesome charting controls that are available. This is compounded with how easy RIA services makes creating data driven applications. That said, it really depends on your development team. If they are already familiar with Silverlight I would go for it, but if they are not be wary that initially it may be slower than if you were working with ASP.Net.