This might sound daft but how do you get silverlight to run as a desktop application? Or should I just use WPF? Is there anything silverlight will bring that WPF wont? From a design and practical coding point of view.
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This might sound daft but how do you get silverlight to run as a desktop application? Or should I just use WPF? Is there anything silverlight will bring that WPF wont? From a design and practical coding point of view.
It depends upon what you mean — do you mean that you want an internet-delivered app, but that you don’t want it to have to be in the browser? If so, then you could use Silverlight with out of browser.
Do you mean that you really want something more like a thick client — like a traditional exe? If so, you will not get much use out of Silverlight. Silverlight is expects to be a distributed app, so it lacks some things that you would expect to have in a desktop app.
Examples:
There is no Ado.net for Silverlight (no way to query a table directly — it expects that you will use web services to retrieve data) (no entity framework for Silverlight either)
Silverlight apps expect to run in partial trust — you have to do some extra work to get Out Of Browser to run in full trust, and since it runs in partial trust by default, you get no file system access. (which is fine for a web app, where your data processing is occuring as a result of service calls)
The Silverlight runtime is a separate animal from the .Net runtime. For the most part, Silverlight is a subset of .net (there are some differences, particularly in XAML features), so you are using a different runtime when you run silverlight. (so upcoming .net 4.5 features won’t be supported in Silverlight, for example).
All that said, Silverlight is a really nice solution for an internet/intranet multi-tier application, it’s just that the app MUST be multi-tier.