U.S. Army using Silverlight for Resourcing Troops

Posted By: Adam Kinney | Sep 2nd @ 8:54 AM | 50,939 Views | 8 Comments
Dan Hickman from ProModel tells the story of converting their Predictive Troop Resourcing application for the U.S. Army from a Windows Forms application to a Silverlight-based application. Reusing existing .NET code, working with familiar controls from IdeaBlade, and helping to get Silverlight on the approved browser plug-ins list for the Army; ProModel was able to build the application in a very short amount of time.
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#Sep 2nd @ 10:27 AM
DmitryNYC
DmitryNYC

This is very cool! Silverlight is underestimated by many but companies and the Government has already realized its potential and i can tell you guys for a fact that corporate use of Silverlight has a huge interest now that V3 has met a lot of functional requirements.

#Sep 2nd @ 8:15 PM
LarryRay
LarryRay

Our company is also converting a lot of old Winform, ActiveX apps into SilverLight. If only there were the right-click context menu, but it's still very impressive.

#Sep 3rd @ 8:26 AM
Kamujin
Kamujin

So you need zero deployment for a winforms applications? Ever heard of clickonce?

 

Not that the silverlight version isn't cool, but you have responsiblity to your customer to offer them all the relevant choices. It seems that this was not the case here.

#Sep 3rd @ 5:31 PM
Ward Bell
Ward Bell

They DID use ClickOnce. That's how the WinForms app was routinely installed and updated. But there was strong resistence from IT to installing any applications on the client, whether ClickOnce is doing it or not. I've found this to be true for years. Many organizations lock down the PC. They don't want Full Trust code running there. This is a major reason "Smart Client" never took hold. Now, all you have to do is get the organization to buy into the plug-in ... and you're golden.

#Sep 4th @ 7:42 AM
Kamujin
Kamujin

Clickone deployment supports web based deployment, so it running in a temp folder not that different from your web cache. IE, not "installed".

 

Your making a different case then he did though when you switch it to a fulltrust / partial trust issue. He clear states "Winforms is great, but we don't want to do any deployment".

#Sep 8th @ 8:43 AM
Ward Bell
Ward Bell

First, I'm a fan of ClickOnce. The problem in many cases is that the client either does not understand all the issues or sees them differently than I do. In this case as I understand it, the client's IT department opposed a smart client app delivered via ClickOnce for all kinds of reasons that could be simply summarized as "deployment". Some of the technical reasons include [a] requires Full Trust, [b] has unfettered access to the PC, and [c] requires a specific version of .NET to be installed on all target machines. These requirement are as much aspects of "deployment" as the location of the bits on the file system.

 

I doubt Dan failed in his duty to educate. He knew the benefits (and headaches) of ClickOnce quite well ... as did his client. He spoke about "reletentless pressure" to be fully in the browser implying that he tried mightily to make his case. He would not have put his success at risk casually to try two risky migration paths (ASP.NET and Silverlight) ... at the client's expense ... unless he had to do so.

 

I've been on his side of that argument. Sometimes the resistence is substantive and sometimes it feels like politics and deliberate misunderstanding. I don't know how Dan encountered it. I am reminded of one of the wisest life questions ever put to me: "do you want to be right or do you want to be effective?"  Evidently, Dan became convinced that he could not be both and had to find an alternate path to delivering the goods ... and Silverlight + DevForce came along just in time.

 

Now that he is in Silverlight and discovered its richness, power and productivity, there will be no going back.

#Sep 11th @ 7:59 AM
dmd0822
dmd0822

Click once is great but what about the fact that Silverlight is Cross Browser/Cross Operating system.  You now have the ability to reach more users with out having to build multiple version of our applications.

#Sep 26th @ 1:46 AM
Hankar
Hankar

Cool! I wanted to say that the Gantt chart component in the WinForms app is GTP.NET from plexityhide.com, and in the Silverlight version it is GTP.NET.SL from plexityhide.com; watch demo here.

 

I also wanted to comment that the use of a framework like ideablade is really key to getting things done fast and still have them maintainable; but I always recommend the ECO framework from CapableObjects.com for cases like this.

 

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