Microsoft has and will come up with new unproven technologies all the time. Some will stick and some will be abandoned. They have to do that just to remain relevant. That doesn’t mean we, as software developers, need to adjust our development platforms every time something new comes out, especially not for enterprise development. We need to separate personal aspirations from what is best for our employers. We are hired to make our employers money. That’s the bottom line. For enterprise applications, a WinForms client with properly layered service architecture on the server side will provide the most value and reduce time-to-market. Why? Because it has been around for ages and it just works. Couple it with ClickOnce and you get an easy deployment mechanism that works well in most corporate scenarios. If you want to waste your employer’s time and money, go ASP.NET and hack your way around with HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX and all the other components that result in pure technical deficit. From a business perspective, what is the reason to use Silverlight for internal enterprise applications aside from one’s personal aspirations? The only reason I can come up with is if you went down the ASP.NET route (which I did at some point) and are buried in technical deficit and need a way out. It does have some potential in creating less chaos, but only if your employer recognizes that it will take a long time to build a development framework around it especially since it is an immature technology. Though, can you build a business case for it demonstrating cost savings or additional revenue? Ultimately, your choice of development platform really depends on your core business and the applications you develop. In typical scenarios, business applications will be written differently than public-facing applications and as such you should use different development tools to achieve your objectives. Personally, I don’t see a real good business argument for Silverlight. Sure it’s cool and you can do some fancy things with it, but will it make your employer more money? E.g., can you see yourself standing in front of your board of directors making an argument that Silverlight will make or save $2M? If you can come up with a real business argument (other than fear of becoming a dinosaur which your employer does not care about) then go for it. Otherwise, stay with what you have and if you are developing public apps then start looking at HTML 5. I heard Ballmer speak at the recent Gartner conference and my take on it was that they r

Is your company being sold or merged with another? Regardless, I don't see how avoiding stored procedures makes the code more portable to other databases. You are still writing TSQL which is not the same as other SQL implementations. I have done a side by side implementation of packaged software against both Oracle and SQL Server. We specifically used stored procedures in order to keep a single set of ASP code as the SQL was much different between the 2 databases. That's a rather strange request...