Silverlight or ASP.NET for slow and old clients

This is my scenario: Our big customer demands that we should develop a part of our ERP solution as a web application. He's bringing hundreds of new users who have pretty old computers on a small bandwidth. Since we have very small experience with building RIA web applications and we develop only in .NET framework I'm asking which technology have the greatest potential performance wise? Small bandwidth is our greatest concern, 开发者_高级运维old computers (512Mb RAM or less, WinXP) are our second concern.

Thanks for any insight.

What are your current team expertise in .NET technologies? Does your team have experience delivering a Silverlight or ASP.net Web form or ASP.net MVC solution?

The minimum system requirement for Silverlight 4 requires at least 512-MB of RAM.

There is also some debate going on around the future of Silverlight as there are quite a few unanswered questions at this point of time.

In my opinion, Silverlight has a slightly longer learning curve compared to say ASP.net MVC.

I would recommend using ASP.net MVC with JQuery for the constrained environment that you want to support.

If you supporting streaming media etc is part of your requirement then you may want to check whether you can support a HTML5 complaint browser on your client machines running XP (Firefox 5 supports XP). You can integrate HTML5 support in ASP.net MVC.

You will obviously need to do some feasibility study for both technology solutions.

It really depends what skills you have. A web app would be best as the only client requirements are a web browser.

But it means building a web app, which if you're not familiar with developing, may slow you down. Silverlight will be closer to what you're familiar with.

Simon

Silverlight has a numerous advantages over ASP.NET. But the old computers is very serious restriction to it. I suggest to develop some "prototype" of yours application using Silverlight and then decide if will it be suitable for such old machines (512Mb RAM or less).

For a example visit http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/ and watch how much memory it consumes.

Otherwise ASP.NET will be the best choice.