Can we share Silverlight application with access Db over LAN

Question

I am developing small institute management system as an academic project in my college. I am going to develop the project in silverlight 4 or 5. In this project I want to provide attendance facility; i.e students will able to log in application from their respective machine which will be connected to LAN. There will be no internet connection available.

Can I develop this application which will not required internet connection once it is installed but can still accessible to different machine which are connected in a network over a LAN

1.How can I achive this?
2. should I use silverlight out of browser app or simple silverlight app
3. Is there any way to achive this using WPF?

Answer 1

@Ash, Silverlight can be desktop oriented, same as WPF. Caveat in some respects is that Silverlight is simplified to utilize Web Services communication, just like Adobe Flash is.

WPF is more oriented to non-Internat (ie Intranet/LAN) connections but pretty much utilizes the same .Net framework as Silverlight.

Although Silverlight is more platform independent than WPF, they operate the same.

You can take a Silverlight application and transition it to WPF with little to no changes (pending on the complexity of your application) to the code-base.

One benefit for WPF over Silverlight is the ability to utilize Click-Once deployment and Version control. Although you can implement a Click-Once styled Silverlight deployment it doesnt work the same as the majority of the Click-Once deployment models out there for the Desktop applications.

I hope this helps you.

Answer 2

After some research I found out the concept called Intranet which should solve my problem of sharing of source code and database.

About what technology should be used:

• its better to develop this application in Silverlight as it is nothing but a subset of WPF.
• Even better to develop the app in both technology to start with as I can use same XAML for both technology with few or no changes at all.

Connecting to database will be simpler in WPF than in Silverlight, as the later does not connect to the database directly and needs a service to achieve this. This service can be written using WCF or Ria service even in a php.