I realize that I am about to make a statement some of you won't agree with. I really want to believe I am wrong, but my experience tells me otherwise. Please don't be too quick to judge until you finish reading.
I am a consulter with a ASP.NET/MVC/CSS/HTML/AJAX background working for a client who happened to approve Silverlight (v.4) as a platform for their enterprise web-application about 2 years ago. The application itself is somewhat standard web-app with tons of forms and few charts. There is nothing worth employing those rich presentation capabilities Silverlight is known for. I wasn't there when that choice was made. The platform was recommended by an offshore team who has done the most of work and managed to make it to beta. At the time the choice was done Silverlight was on the rise and looked like yet immature but promising fashionable technology that doesn't have a rival and was thought to stay.
Now I am assigned to work on some bugfixing and implementing small features and it's getting more and more obvious that Silverlight was a poor choice. Let me explain. Even though the Silverlight platform is capable enough to provide all necassery means for solving the business problem it has some serious flaws (the following is solely my opinion based on my personal experience):
high learning curve
boilerplate code that is hard-to-read and follow yet necessary to wire things up (PRISM, IoC frameworks), so that the app was in a minimal setup that you could run
lots of bugs and inconsistencies in the framework codebase that are there to stay for the sake of not breaking what's been already built based on them
poor documentation (how would you do template selection based on a data context?)
infamous history of versions full of breaking changes and abandoned techniques (for ex. WCF client proxy with the Async pattern and event approaches)
error prone due to widely spread type-unsafe bindings and run-time evaluations (no comments)
Cumbersome stiff and verbose XAML syntax that requires tons of markup for expressing simple things. Have you tried to restyle a validation tooltip of a textbox? Say, you want its border to be orange instead of red. Here is how you can do this. All you need is to copy THE-ENTIRE-XAML-THAT-COMPLETELY-DEFINES-A-TEXTBOX and then just change one property.
slow even on modern computers (due to not following best practices which are hard-to-find-the-latest-one and inconsistent with one another)
This is my firm belief. All in all I think Silverligh is very high in maintenance while doesn't show a noticeable difference (compared to let's say AJAX/HTML) in return on investment.
I am convinced that even though the project is in a wrapping up stage now, all further development should be diverged into a parallel project based on HTML5 with a modern MVVM/MVC client framework (AngularJS, Backbone). I already had a quick talk about this to my client, but I wasn't ready to support my point with real facts and numbe So this is what I am working right now: I am building some ground, looking for evidences and case-studies that show that Silverlight is a poor choice taking into account all of the above considerations.
The problem is that the most information I've managed to find comes from blogs and forums. I am looking for some official studies / authoritative opinions / research documents / accepted articles that break down the reason why HTML5/AJAX/CSS3 is a better platform for building an enterprise applications than Silverlight.
I would appreciate if you pointed out at some resources that could support my point. Thank you.
UPDATE
These are the examples on why Silverlight isn't worth of your time:
Take a look at this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.controls.textbox.watermark(v=vs.95).aspx The TextBox.Watermark property was forgotten to be implemented. This example is very illustrative showing Microsoft's attitude to their creation. It cost me 2 hours to try solutions from the other developers to find out that non of the works, so that I ended up writing my own: http://stackoverflow.com/a/13650343/139667
An author of a MVVM faramework on Silverlight probelms: http://devlicio.us/blogs/rob_eisenberg/archive/2012/04/18/the-manifold-blunders-of-xaml-part-1-version-and-platform-hell.aspx
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