Asp.net vs Silverlight suggestion

Interest question...

Well I'll say it depends on your expertise, experience and budget. Any kind of tool/technology takes a good amount of time to become a master in that. having that said the "Hello world" program can be written in minutes or seconds in any programming language by going through basic tutorials but the problem and challanges start when you start developing a real world application.

If you are planning for any tool, you have to pay time to understand the + and - of it. Do a feasibility analysis, a simple example would be if you want to use Silverlight google for "problem silverlight" or "features of silverlight" you'll see lot of people commenting or advocating about silverlight. Then put your business requirement in place and check which falls under existing technology problem area and see if a proper solution is available.

If i take another example of WPF client you need to install it on every users machine with every new release if you are targeting it with a thin client then you wont get full benefit, but you will get a faster UI. Again if you're keeping services in one server and hitting it with client then probably you will hit them with SOAP and then you may need to put Authentication code for each request, that too, will make outgoing request bulky.

ASP.NET - the web forms are certainly heavy but there are alternatives like use ajax or the new MVC comes with Visual Studio 2010. The MVC can provide you TDD it is much more cleaner and on top of it its open source and the source code is provided from Microsoft.

So I'll vote for asp.net MVC.



Thanks,
Hemant

Edit:
Take a balanced approach.
- If user are less then you can go with WPF but if the total user are huge then it will be problematic.
- The good thing about client applications is they are fast and they have less restriction in terms of using desktop resources, but the bad thing is different desktop may raise different types of exception based on there system configuration.
- Ask the business what is the most common work they do and then do some R&D on the technology you want to use.
- The webservices are good but they use XML and that is string, that means if there are lots of binary data transfer between client and server than you have to convert binary data to base64 (i.e. string) and that will be costly. but if such operation is rare, then no issue.
- Create small POC's and test the network traffic if performance is critical. you can use Fiddler, its free and there are free addons available.

Thanks,
Hemant