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jqueryasp.net-mvcintranet

What technology stack would you recommend for an data-entry intensive intranet application using Microsoft tools (asp.net mvc OR silverlight)?


I am looking out for suggestions regarding development of a data-entry intensive application for an intranet.

What technology would you suggest for the same on the Microsoft Platform? I am not looking at smart client options. This is basically browser based application.

Current stack which I have in mind is

  1. ASP.NET MVC + JQUERY
  2. ASP.NET + Silverlight

Please suggest your experience/suggestion considering the nature of application including benefits, pitfalls, performance etc.

Speed (from data-entry perspective) is of utmost important in this application.

Imagine this to be a Point of Sale (POS) kind application where you need to process the customers entry quickly....else the queue will keep on growing with rumbling customers..

(But again, no smart-client recommendation please as I know this will be best for this kind of scenarios)

NOTE: I am not looking for comparison between asp.net mvc vs. silverlight.


Solution

  • I work for a large financial institution and we just tackled this same idea. For us, it came down to the design pattern we wanted to use the most. For Silverlight, you're dealing with XAML and it's recommended going the MVVM pattern. For MVC, well, it's a bit obvious...

    We chose ASP.NET MVC and here's why:

    • Silverlight on client machines was too big of an unknown for us. We understand it's as light as it gets to still run on the client but we were not comfortable with that rolling it to 10's of 1000's of clients. We had that heartache in our Smart Client deployments in the past.

    • We were more comfortable of MVC over MVVM. We felt we could be more agile in development.

    As far as queuing up work, that's more backend async stuff to me. It would be similar on any framework you chose. Other than that, you'll bang your head on the tradeoffs.