First for the update was the catalog administration section which allow for complete control over the products and categories displayed on the site. We've tried to make it as quick and intuitive as possible to add new products to the site as it's something that can take quite a while, especially when you have hundreds of products to add to your store. To this end we've implemented the catalog administration section in silverlight this allows for quick development of the section and using RIA services we've been able to have seemless background updates allowing users to continue to add products while changes are pushed to the backend database behind the scenes. This also gives us the ability to add slick UI features like drag and drop, upload status bars, validation as you type, date pickers and Deep Zoom.
Although all of this is possible with HTML & JavaScript we've found that the code is simpler and quicker to develop with the Silverlight version and it gives us a better user experience. Silverlight has all the advantages of a desktop application but without the hassle of deploying new versions to multiple clients. The downside to using silverlight is that it restricts the platforms that some of the administration elements can be run on. But as it's the backend administration tools rather than the frontend website it's something we don't think will be a problem.
