C# Social Networking: what to use

David Smith

My goal is to create a social network website similiar to facebook, twitter etc......
Question 1: Do you recommend using third party controls why and why not,

Question 2: I want to either use asp.net or silverlight or i can use both together, which do you recommend using?

Question 3. If you were creating a social networking site using infragistics controls, would you silverlight, asp, or light switch infragistics controls? or telerik controls etc....

7 Replies

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raden massbrow11y ago
if my own for a while making the web social bookmarking dofollow which functions almost like a social network
David Smith14y ago
Yea i actually just build a light switch using infragistics 11.2 at my job building the application on top of a database. it was pretty cool.
Mahesh Chand14y ago
Also read my blog

HTML 5 brings slow death to Silverlight and Flash by Mahesh Chand On Feb 01, 2012
Mahesh Chand14y ago
Check this out about Silverlight:
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Forums/Thread/159334/silverlight-6.aspx

Microsoft is talking about metro-style apps and Windows 8. There is no talk about Silverlight. People are even saying that Silverlight 5 will be the last version of Silverlight.
Mahesh Chand14y ago
Well .. building a website like Facebook is a lot of work. There is a lot of functionality behind the scene. If you have enough time, resources, and money, you should build them in native languages like using plain HTML and JavaScript with some ASP.NET. If you use controls like DataGrid in ASP.NET, it will make your page size load larger and slower. If you do not have enough time, resource and money, you can go with existing third party controls. But if you need to change anything in the control, you are stuck. I use Telerik ASP.NET 2.0 Tab control and other controls in one of our applications. Controls made website load so slow, we had to remove them.

If you write code in HTML and see View Source in your browser and then put a control like Infragistics on your page and View Source, you will see page size (the amount of data downloads on a client machine browser) is a lot more.

Lightswitch is not for you. It is for businesses who have a database and want to build applications on top of that.

Hope it helps!
David Smith14y ago
what does money and resourses have to do with it, im curious. Why do you say silverlight is dead. What do you mean when you say controls are heavy? Then if i were to use third party controls I would always use the latest.

Alot of people saying use ASP.NET, MVC Framework, JQuery with HTML5.

What about lightswitch?
Mahesh Chand14y ago
It all depends on how much time, money and resource you have. I would not recommend using third party unless they are light-weight controls. Most of the third party controls are heavy. Also some third party controls use older technologies. When you pick a third party control, you need to make sure they are not old.

I would not recommend Silverlight. Silverlight is dead. ASP.NET, MVC Framework, JQuery with HTML5 are recommended.

I would not use Infragistics controls. They are more visual than light weight.