Silverlight EOL Emergency: A 90-Day Visual Strategy for Aerospace Enterprise Apps

Your Aerospace ERP or maintenance tracking system is a ticking time bomb. While Microsoft officially ended support for Silverlight in October 2021, thousands of mission-critical applications in the aerospace sector still run on "life support"—relying on outdated versions of Internet Explorer, insecure browser wrappers, or virtualization hacks that create massive security vulnerabilities. In a high-stakes industry where a single software failure can ground a fleet or compromise supply chain integrity, the "wait and see" approach is no longer an option.

The traditional path to modernization is a death march. According to industry data, 70% of legacy rewrites fail or exceed their timelines, and the average enterprise rewrite takes 18 to 24 months. For an aerospace firm facing a silverlight emergency 90day visual migration window, that timeline is unacceptable. You don't have two years; you have a quarter to move from a deprecated plugin to a modern, cloud-native React architecture.

TL;DR: Aerospace enterprises can no longer ignore the security and operational risks of Silverlight. By leveraging Replay and its Visual Reverse Engineering capabilities, teams can bypass manual documentation gaps and convert legacy UI into production-ready React components. This 90-day strategy focuses on recording existing workflows to generate code, reducing migration time by 70% and turning an 18-month project into a 12-week sprint.

---

The Aerospace Technical Debt Crisis#

The global technical debt is estimated at $3.6 trillion, and a significant portion of that sits within the manufacturing and aerospace sectors. These industries built massive, complex RIA (Rich Internet Application) systems in the late 2000s using Silverlight because of its superior data-binding and heavy-duty charting capabilities.

Today, those systems are "black boxes." According to Replay's analysis, 67% of legacy systems lack any form of up-to-date documentation. The original developers have retired, the source code is often missing or doesn't match the production environment, and the business logic is trapped inside compiled .xap files.

When you are facing a silverlight emergency 90day visual migration, you cannot afford to spend 40 hours per screen manually documenting and rewriting code. You need a way to extract the "truth" of the application directly from the user interface.

Video-to-code is the process of using computer vision and AI to analyze video recordings of a running application's UI and automatically generate structured code, design tokens, and component hierarchies.

---

The 90-Day Silverlight Emergency 90day Visual Strategy#

To hit a 90-day target, you must abandon the "Waterfall" rewrite model. Instead, we use a Visual Reverse Engineering approach that prioritizes the most critical workflows.

Phase 1: The Visual Audit (Days 1–15)#

Stop looking for documentation that doesn't exist. Instead, record your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) performing their daily tasks. In the aerospace context, this might be "Part Procurement Workflow" or "Engine Maintenance Logging."

By using Replay, these recordings are transformed into a structured Library of components and Flows. This replaces the traditional "Discovery" phase that usually takes 3-4 months.

Phase 2: Component Extraction and Library Building (Days 16–45)#

Once the workflows are recorded, the AI Automation Suite within Replay analyzes the visual patterns. It identifies buttons, data grids, sidebars, and complex forms.

Industry experts recommend building a centralized Design System first, rather than individual pages. This ensures that the new React application maintains a consistent look and feel, even if the legacy Silverlight app was a fragmented mess of custom styles.

Phase 3: Logic Hydration and Integration (Days 46–75)#

With the UI components generated, your engineering team focuses on "hydrating" these components with real data. Since Silverlight often used WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) or SOAP services, this phase involves mapping those legacy endpoints to modern REST or GraphQL APIs.

Phase 4: Validation and Cutover (Days 76–90)#

The final 15 days are dedicated to UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and parallel running. Because the new UI was generated from the visual "truth" of the old system, user training is virtually eliminated—the buttons are where they expect them to be, but they are now running in a secure, modern browser.

---

Why Manual Rewrites Fail the Aerospace Sector#

In aerospace, the complexity of data grids is often the primary blocker. A Silverlight grid might handle 10,000 rows of telemetry data with real-time updates. Manually recreating this in React with the same performance characteristics is a high-effort task.

---

Technical Deep Dive: From XAML to React#

The core of the silverlight emergency 90day visual strategy is the automated conversion of XAML layouts into functional TypeScript and React code. Let's look at what a typical aerospace data entry component looks like in Silverlight versus the modernized output.

The Legacy: Silverlight XAML#

xml
<!-- Legacy Silverlight Maintenance Log Entry -->
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
    <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" Margin="10">
        <TextBlock Text="Part Serial Number" Style="{StaticResource LabelStyle}"/>
        <TextBox x:Name="PartSNInput" Width="200" Text="{Binding PartSerialNumber, Mode=TwoWay}"/>
        <Button x:Name="SubmitBtn" Content="Log Maintenance" Click="SubmitBtn_Click" 
                Background="#FF005596" Foreground="White"/>
    </StackPanel>
</Grid>

The challenge here isn't just the XML; it's the underlying C# code-behind and the proprietary Silverlight event lifecycle. When you use Replay, the system doesn't just look at the code; it looks at the rendered result. It sees the padding, the hex code of the blue button, and the state change when the button is clicked.

The Modernized Output: React + Tailwind CSS#

This is the type of clean, documented code Replay produces from a video recording of the above Silverlight component:

typescript
import React, { useState } from 'react';

interface MaintenanceLogProps {
  initialSN?: string;
  onSubmit: (sn: string) => void;
}

/**
 * Modernized Maintenance Log Component
 * Generated via Replay Visual Reverse Engineering
 */
export const MaintenanceLog: React.FC<MaintenanceLogProps> = ({ initialSN = '', onSubmit }) => {
  const [partSN, setPartSN] = useState(initialSN);

  return (
    <div className="p-4 bg-white shadow-md rounded-lg max-w-md">
      <div className="flex flex-col gap-4">
        <label className="text-sm font-semibold text-slate-700">
          Part Serial Number
        </label>
        <input
          type="text"
          value={partSN}
          onChange={(e) => setPartSN(e.target.value)}
          className="w-full px-3 py-2 border border-slate-300 rounded focus:ring-2 focus:ring-blue-600"
          placeholder="Enter SN..."
        />
        <button
          onClick={() => onSubmit(partSN)}
          className="bg-[#005596] hover:bg-[#00447a] text-white font-bold py-2 px-4 rounded transition-colors"
        >
          Log Maintenance
        </button>
      </div>
    </div>
  );
};

By generating functional components that utilize modern best practices—like Tailwind CSS for styling and TypeScript for type safety—the silverlight emergency 90day visual approach ensures that you aren't just moving technical debt from one platform to another. You are creating a sustainable foundation for the next decade.

---

Managing Complex Aerospace Flows#

Aerospace applications are rarely a series of simple forms. They are complex "Flows"—multi-step processes involving nested modals, conditional logic, and state that persists across different modules.

Flow Mapping is the architectural process of identifying every possible user path through a legacy application to ensure no edge cases are missed during modernization.

In a silverlight emergency 90day visual migration, you use Replay’s "Flows" feature to map these out. Instead of a developer trying to guess how the "Engine Overhaul Workflow" functions, an SME records the entire process. Replay then generates a visual map of the application architecture.

Handling Real-time Data Grids#

One of the biggest hurdles in Silverlight-to-React migrations is the DataGrid. Silverlight's

was incredibly performant for its time. To match this, Replay assists in selecting and configuring modern equivalents like TanStack Table or AG Grid.

typescript
// Replay-generated configuration for a high-performance Aerospace Data Grid
import { useTable, useSortBy, Column } from 'react-table';

const columns: Column[] = [
  { Header: 'Component ID', accessor: 'id' },
  { Header: 'Current Status', accessor: 'status' },
  { Header: 'Last Inspection', accessor: 'lastDate' },
  { Header: 'Flight Hours', accessor: 'hours' },
];

// Replay identifies the data patterns from the video and suggests 
// the appropriate column types and formatting.

---

Security and Compliance in Regulated Environments#

For aerospace and defense, security is paramount. You cannot simply upload your UI recordings to a public cloud. This is why Replay is built for regulated environments.

• •SOC2 & HIPAA Ready: High standards for data handling.
• •On-Premise Availability: Keep your proprietary UI data within your own network.
• •Air-Gapped Compatibility: For the most sensitive defense applications.

When executing a silverlight emergency 90day visual plan, the security team is often the biggest hurdle. By providing an on-premise solution that doesn't require sending source code to an external AI, Replay satisfies the rigorous compliance requirements of the aerospace industry.

---

The Cost of Inaction#

Every day your enterprise continues to rely on Silverlight is a day you risk a catastrophic failure. Browser vendors are aggressively removing the "hooks" that allow Silverlight wrappers to function. A single "Silent Update" to Windows or a Chromium-based browser could render your fleet management system useless overnight.

Beyond the risk of failure, there is the "opportunity cost." Modern web frameworks allow for mobile responsiveness, better accessibility (A11Y), and integration with modern AI and analytics tools. A silverlight emergency 90day visual migration isn't just about survival; it's about modernization.

According to a recent Replay study on design systems, companies that move from legacy plugins to a structured React component library see a 45% increase in developer velocity for all subsequent feature development.

---

Frequently Asked Questions#

What happens if we don't have the original Silverlight source code?#

This is the primary advantage of the silverlight emergency 90day visual strategy. Because Replay uses Visual Reverse Engineering, it does not require access to the original XAML or C# source code. By recording the application as it runs in a legacy browser, Replay can reconstruct the UI and component logic based on the visual output and user interactions.

Can Replay handle complex business logic hidden in the Silverlight code-behind?#

Replay excels at capturing the UI and the "intent" of the interaction. While purely backend logic (like a complex physics calculation) will still need to be migrated or exposed via an API, Replay captures the frontend state transitions. This allows developers to see exactly how the UI is supposed to respond to specific data, making the logic rewrite significantly faster.

Is the 90-day timeline realistic for a large aerospace application?#

Yes, provided you focus on the most critical 80% of the application. By using Replay to automate the UI generation, you save the thousands of hours typically spent on manual CSS and HTML layout. This allows your team to focus entirely on data integration and testing, which are the true bottlenecks in any migration.

How does Replay ensure the generated React code is maintainable?#

Unlike "low-code" platforms that produce "spaghetti code," Replay generates clean, human-readable TypeScript and React components. It follows modern best practices, such as component atomicity and clear prop definitions. You own the code; there is no proprietary runtime or vendor lock-in.

---

Conclusion: Take Flight with Modern Web Standards#

The Silverlight emergency is real, but it doesn't have to be a disaster. By shifting from a "Code-First" to a "Visual-First" modernization strategy, aerospace enterprises can bypass the documentation gap and the manual rewrite trap.

The silverlight emergency 90day visual approach is the only way to meet aggressive timelines without sacrificing quality or security. With Replay, you can turn your legacy recordings into a future-proof React ecosystem in weeks, not years.

Ready to modernize without rewriting? Book a pilot with Replay