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Is creating a huge public site fully in Silverlight really advisable? for eg. an ecommerce site. I don't want to start any debate but actually I feel Silverlight shouldn't be used for full website because the biggest loss you incur is of SEO. No search engines till today can parse the xap file and index it based on it's content. You can get around it by doing ifs and thens like if Silverlight is not supported then make an Asp.Net equivalent page for it but that only doubles our effort of making application, more than anything else. Why write double code in 2 applications meant for the same purpose. If that is the only option why not create Asp.Net application only. What are your views?

Thanks in advance :)

TCM
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Short answer: no. Right now the future of Silverlight seems unsure. But this is just my personal opinion.

SkyDrive drops Silverlight

Silverlight developers rally against Windows 8 plans

Microsoft surrenders Silverlight to HTML5 on cross-platform front

Teletha
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Even if MS was still 100% behind Silverlight, the SEO issue has been around and been solved for a while. See my answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3748828/silverlight-seo/3749844#3749844

Given that you need to write a simple ASP.net site anyway (for SEO), you can either choose to only write that one site (if your site does not need to be a Rich Internet Application), or write both. You can always think of Silverlight as a plugin for specific pages.

The question should be "what is the best way to give my users insert some fabulous experience here". So does your planned website need Silverlight to add user value or some unique selling point?

The other issue regarding HTML5 vs Silverlight is: do you really want to become an expert in multiple language stacks?

Personally I love Silverlight and will be extremely miffed if M$ decide to drop it. For now they are now targetting it at WP7, so it will not die just yet. Let's see if WP7 gets a foothold before holding a funeral for SL.

Community
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iCollect.it Ltd
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I'm part of a team developing a full application in Silverlight and it's definitely the right tool for the problem we have to solve - but it's not a public facing application so the lack of SEO isn't a problem.

If you need your application to be discoverable then you need good SEO so that it turns up in searches (says he stating the obvious). A single Silverlight application can't easily do this.

If you need your application to be fully supported on all operating systems then again Silverlight can't do this as it's only officially supported on Windows and OSX.

You always needs to evaluate your requirements and choose the platform/framework/language that helps you meet these as efficiently as possible.

ChrisF
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