Commerce Server Blog

For past couple of years, I have worked on couple of ecommerce projects where the ecommerce front end was developed using ASP.NET and flash and integrates with commerce server 2007 through API/web services. I have delivered nice look and feel portals with good usability features. Most of the people don’t know about integration of flash & commerce server to create nice and good looking ecommerce applications. From my perspective, the main disadvantage with this approach is designer dependency. As a programmer, I have limited visibility till commerce server and involvement into flash UI design is nil or very little. The graphic designers don’t have much knowledge on technical aspects and they don’t understand what information they need to make the site work.  It is developer responsibility to analyze the data, think on all abilities (scalability, performance, extensibility, etc) before the development/design work starts.

One year before, Microsoft has come up with Silverlight (v1.1 alpha). I personally feel this software as flash competitor.  The advantage of Silverlight is the frontend code is created in XAML and the code behind using C#.NET. This makes me (as a developer) very happy as I have total control on UI code. At the maximum, I will reach graphic designer for look and feel and rendering graphics, animations are within my control.

Recently I has developed a small ecommerce application using Silverlight 1.1 (alpha). It’s a nightmare to build end to end application where Silverlight doesn’t support many of the core development features (like controls, grids, UI panels, etc) and in the month of March Microsoft has released new version of Silverlight 2.0 (beta). This software was far better than older version as it provides user controls to build applications similar to ASP.NET.  To my surprise, when I decided to migrate current application to new version, I found there are lot of architecture changes and finally end up in creating the code from the scratch.

Some of the key problems I still feel from Silverlight are

1.       Web service calls are asynchronous. This makes the application run slower.

2.       All the features of WPF are not supported by Silverlight.

3.       Silverlight 2.0 guide states the support of WCF but it is nightmare to implement.

4.       The Silverlight controls are heavy and take time to download on client browsers.

5.       Error happened in web services cannot be catch at Silverlight component.

One thing we should keep in mind that Silverlight 2.0 software is still in beta and I see in next two years it will overcome flash and provide all features supported by WPF. If you have any questions/suggestions, kindly raise them through comments section.

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