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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?
DoctorAV
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  • ok? Not alot of details. Give us more details as to how your deploying a Silverlight application without an Internet connection? You might have Silverlight confused with WPF, which WPF is the desktop version of Silverlight. Again, give us more details on how you plan on deploying this applet (either form) and getting it to the end-user without their being an internet connection. – GoldBishop Oct 12 '12 at 19:25
  • Without more details, the answers are: 1. with WCF, 2. either, 3. yes. – Joel Lucsy Oct 12 '12 at 20:41
  • If you actually have a choice between SL OOO and WPF go WPF. But it all depends on whether you need the application as a website or a locally installed application. If there is no need to have it in a browser save yourself the headache and use WPF. – Xcalibur37 Oct 12 '12 at 22:56
  • @GoldBishop thats is actually my question i.e can I develop app using silverlight which can be accessible on all the machine which are connected over LAN using localhost insted of connecting to the network – DoctorAV Oct 13 '12 at 04:58
  • @Xcalibur37 if i devlop app using wpf can it be share over Lan – DoctorAV Oct 13 '12 at 05:20
  • Sure. It works like any website would. – Xcalibur37 Oct 13 '12 at 20:01

2 Answers2

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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.

DoctorAV
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  • that is correct, Silverlight is a Client Control framework and as such, requires a derived connector (Web Services) to access data. Think of the Silverlight Application as an abstract desktop application that requires the destination database to have an intermediate handler of information. Which it sounds like you need a direct connection to the data source. Caveat to all this is that you can make a Internet Reference to the WebService and consume it via Silverlight but Visual Studio tends to bloat the connector, so you will need to code edit it down. – GoldBishop Oct 15 '12 at 20:14
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@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.

GoldBishop
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  • Thanks for your valuable answer. Only due to this I started to research and finally realize the solution as I have posted above. I feel that I m heading in right direction still long way to go though... – DoctorAV Oct 15 '12 at 17:23