Need advice for Silverlight CMS

Question

I'm currently building a Silverlight Content Management System for Website Management.

At first, I had a ASP.NET MVC 3 CMS, so I thought I'd use it as an API and play with it from my Silverlight frontend. It worked pretty well.

But then I thought, what if I could simply use the DBML from my MVC 3 CMS directly from my Silverlight app? So I tried and I decided it was a bit too weird so I turned myself around and looked for other alternative.

I've been using WCF Services for quite some time for other work-related projects, and I started thinking that may be what I'm looking for. So now I'm kind of dizzy between all those solutions I found.

At the bottom line all I need is a Silverlight UI to play with a MSSQL database on which a ASP.NET MVC 3 App will use to serve its website.

[EDIT: Also! This should all fit on a shared hosting environment (that is why I was bugging on the WCF alternative since sometimes we have to edit a bit of the IIS settings...)]

So, what would be the best scenario? I'm ready to restart from scratch, this is a personal project I'm making for an upgrade on my previous CMS for some of my clients so this is not urgent : I can try as many time I want :P

Thanks and happy holidays!

Answer 1

Silverlight is great for specific uses. If you not targeting everybody and everyone Silverlight can be pleasant to work with and you can get things done quick.

Couple things:

1. If your CMS needs multiple views, modules, etc - check PRISM for that. Took me quite some time to "get it" but now it just "clicks"

2. Learn MVVM. I guess after MVC it will be kind of obvious.

3. As far as data acceess goes.. I don't know what can you use if it's not WCF.. You can write your own Httphandler I guess :) My own approach is to NOT use shared hosts. One of the $10 hosts I tried to use was worthless. Slow and never got my url rewriting working with them - support was 0. You can buy pretty affordable hosting from Amazon and do whatever you want with it.

4. Also Silverlight can do plain HTTP - most of the solutions/technologies out there using WCF as a backing technology. RIA Services is Microsoft's technology to bring data to client easily. There is free frameworks like CSLA. I'm using commercial product DevForce which allows you to do LINQ queries on Silverlight side and they take of rest.

If you need more specific info on something - let us know.