Picked Silverlight 4.0 over WPF 4.0

It has been two months to work on a POC for a new client, a major marine transportation company. I am the sole SunGard technology resource along with BAs to work with the client. It is very rewarding to work on the archeticture from ground up. It gave me the chances to compare the technologies side by side. We have hand-picked the following technologies the in-house transportation scheduling engine.

• Silverlight, and XAML
• MVVM, and Prism
• Unit tests, MSTest, MOQ, and TDD
• Multi-threaded programming, and TPL
• Distributed System, and NServiceBus
• Entity Frameworks, and WCF Data Service
• WCF, and REST
• FitNesse, SliMTest, and Acceptance Test
• Telerik Silverlight Controls
• Distributed Cache, e.g. SharedCache, AppFabric
• Oracle ODP .NET client to Oracle Financial System

Visualization is the key of the POC. The reason that we pick up Silverlight over WPF is that the map performance. Telerik Map Silverlight Radcontrols is performing much better than WPF with the DeepZoom technology. The map is the highlight of the POC. It visualize the routes, the locations, the boat speed, and scheduling features. On the plus side, Silverlight can also support multiple platforms like Apple MacOS. So Silveright wins. To be honest, as a developer I would never like Silverlight over WPF. But the map is just so beautiful and more informative than any other means. WPF doesn’t support it as well as Silverlight.