Microsoft Silverlight

Decos adopted the Silverlight platform, offered by Microsoft, when it was just released in 2007. It recommends Silverlight to its customers as it is cross browser & cross platform plugin. Silverlight allows creating rich user interface with low bandwidth overhead. The client side software is completely written in C# which provides additional features of .NET on client side.

Silverlight Projects

Decos is currently working on number of Silverlight projects. All these are LOB (line-of-business) solutions created in Silverlight 4. Some are now being migrated to Silverlight 5 as well. We are extensively using controls from Silverlight Toolkit & third party controls like Telerik, Mind Fusion (Diagram Lite) etc. The development is done by strictly following the MVVM Framework & best coding practices of Silverlight. The user interface is created by a dedicated Silverlight design team, which focuses on reusable theme based designs. Following are some of specific techniques used in our projects

• Make use of Object binding intensively. This helps connecting Data coming from Server easily with Client Controls of Silverlight.
• Effective communication between JavaScript and Silverlight objects.
• Make use of Data Converter to convert/format data received from server and sent back to server.

WCF (Service Layer)

To act as Service platform for Silverlight, Decos chooses Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It is faster & more flexible as compared to traditional web services. WCF supports scaling/load balancing & is interoperable to Java & Linux clients. More importantly, it can be invoked by any protocol (e.g. http, tcp etc.) and any transport type.

In Decos, all important aspect of WCF are being mastered & used. The development is done using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Some of the major features used are as below

• Security: Certificate & Username/Password
• Authentication: Token based authentication (for Silverlight)
• Binding: wsHttp, basicHttp & Duplex

Supporting tools/technologies

In some of the Decos projects, where queued messaging is needed NServicebus is used along with WCF. It is chosen for its plug-ability & easy collaboration between business-oriented services.

For Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) to SQL Server database, Decos uses NHibernate. It provides data query and retrieval facilities. It also significantly reduce development time otherwise spent with manual data handling in SQL and ADO.NET

Domain Expertise

• Workflow Designer Module: Since Client software was created in Silverlight, we were able to create simple and effective User Experience. This helps End user define their Business process in DMS (Document management system). Silverlight allows easy deployment of new changes without affecting client host.
• Decos developed multiple WCF/Silverlight solutions on Dutch Healthcare Insurance domain. In this solution web service works as a wrapper over VECOZO service. It is made using VEKTIS standards. It is then consumed by Silverlight client & same is also exposed to software consumers / vendors which can use the service.
• Decos developed a BPMN solution (Business Process Modeling Notation) to model processes of any organization. It also developed archimate standards for modeling architecture views.

The Future with Silverlight

With the Microsoft's vision of moving towards HTML5, Decos has started recreating parts of Silverlight products into HTML5 for its customers. This is to allow these applications to be used in more devices like android smartphones (iPhones, Android etc) &Tablets (iPads).