I’m looking for suggestions for the following issue, and I realize there is really not going to be a perfect answer to my question:
I have a UI built in WinForms.NET (v4.0 framework) with WCF back-end and EF4 model objects, that I am looking to port to the web. UI is not huge and is not super complex and is structured well. But it is not a super simple system either. I am looking to pick a technology stack for the web-frontend that will target desktop & partially mobile platforms, provide a good development platform to build on, and facilitate code reuse across UI and back-end tiers…
I would rather avoid:
- custom coding of UI-centric scripts, because they are hard to debug, non-compiled, usually a maintenance nightmare, almost always start to contain business logic, and duplicate some of the logic that back-end tiers have (especially validation)
- custom-coding for Desktop Web and Mobile Web UI’s separately (although I realize that mobile web UI will likely contain fewer of data-entry screens and more reporting screens)
- non-.NET technology stacks
I would love to:
- target the reporting capabilities of the system toward mobile web browsers
- not have to write a single line of script (javascript, jquery, etc.)
- utilize a good collection of controls that produces an elegant UI
- use .NET for everything
The way I see it right now, I need to re-write this app in Silverlight, utilize a 3rd party UI framework like Telerik, and re-do the reports UI again for mobile platforms separately. However, I’m rather concerned about the shelf-life of Silverlight and the needed to deploy a different architecture to deal with mobile platform.
Is there an ASP.NET/MVC/Ajax architecture/framework/library that would allow me to get at the power of .NET and without painful (imho) client-side scripting, while providing a decent user experience
Thank you
SilverLight would give you the compile-time support and wouldn’t have you writing “script”.