Silverlight / HTML5 (and WPF)

WPF is the base for silverlight, so, I have no idea what he is talking about. And I used WPF, it is amazing, period. Obviously there are some legacy resistance, but, eventually they will have to move on. Doesn't matter, newer gen will use it and forget about the legacy people anyway.

And yeah, even VS is using WPF now. And nice looking stuff like Blend is long already WPF. And WinLiveApps finally get rid of XP support, which may likely going to move to WPF in the future. (BTW, yeah, XP can do WPF, but, most people will not upgrade as already happened.)

W3bbo said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

I'm probably not your typical "Microsoft-ecosystem developer" but I think the reasons I don't use WPF are the same reasons few other developers use it too:

 

First and foremost: the WPF designer in VS sucks. You have to use Expression Blend, but that's a separate product with its own learning curve. WPF is hardly as simple as WinForms in getting something up-and-running.

 

I'm also put off by the lack of WPF applications that aren't ugly. WinForms makes it easy to make something that looks presentable. Pretty much all the WPF apps I've seen in the wild (with the exception of Expression and VS2010) are horrible abominations. Developers are not designers.

 

Other things, like the extra initialization delay put me off.

You don't need to be doing any kind of crazy whiz-bang animation or custom UI for WPF to be useful. The data binding and validation tooling alone is worth the price of admission. I've used it to great success in some LOB applications with nothing other than the stock templates. So far, I'm much more productive in WPF than I ever was in WinForms.

I kind of thought my original game plan

Learn Silverlight (from VS) ->

Learn Silverlight (from Blend) ->

Learn WPF?

was good, allowing me to be productive from the off (but gradually enrich my skills over time).  I suspect that the market will demand that spot 3 now becones learn HTML5

I am at spot 2 at the moment (I actually like Blend now and find it a big help - in part thanks to the enthusiasm of people like Adam Kinney - my starting point was one of fear!).

I have a similar approach to server side (which culminates in Azure), although I have less demands on that track at the moment.

Not sure why I am sharing this (other than the fact that it helps me to understand my own position in all this)

W3bbo said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

I'm probably not your typical "Microsoft-ecosystem developer" but I think the reasons I don't use WPF are the same reasons few other developers use it too:

 

First and foremost: the WPF designer in VS sucks. You have to use Expression Blend, but that's a separate product with its own learning curve. WPF is hardly as simple as WinForms in getting something up-and-running.

 

I'm also put off by the lack of WPF applications that aren't ugly. WinForms makes it easy to make something that looks presentable. Pretty much all the WPF apps I've seen in the wild (with the exception of Expression and VS2010) are horrible abominations. Developers are not designers.

 

Other things, like the extra initialization delay put me off.

Here is a shameless example of mine

http://jmchome.web.officelive.com/default.aspx

Please let me know what you think. Obviously I am not a good designer, I have bad tastes, but, I tried my best. Pretty old program as a testing ground to learn WPF .

kettch said:

W3bbo said:

*snip*

You don't need to be doing any kind of crazy whiz-bang animation or custom UI for WPF to be useful. The data binding and validation tooling alone is worth the price of admission. I've used it to great success in some LOB applications with nothing other than the stock templates. So far, I'm much more productive in WPF than I ever was in WinForms.

Having played with Silverlight for WP7 with the Beta tools, I can see that putting together a WPF form might be faster than doing so with WinForms - typing out some XML with VS2010's excellent intellisense it pretty rapid and the layout and alignment does seem to be better in WPF because it's more 'built in' than WebForms.

... conversion to WPF fan is 10% complete ...

Herbie

http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2010/09/10/iphone-4-is-dead.aspx?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed">http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2010/09/10/iphone-4-is-dead.aspx

What he said.

The very fact that SL is stuck in 32-bit while WPF on 64 guarantees the latter stays around as long as it takes for the former to catch up.

Silverlight is only 32-bit on the Web - it's 64-bit or 32-bit on the desktop (and you'll struggle to find a Windows user using a x64 IE/Firefox/etc)

Also WPF isn't dead, but it is now dead on the web. Microsoft have effectively been silently killing XBAPs over the past couple of months - the IE9 RTM won't run them from the Internet zone and a Windows update last night basically took them out of IE by making the user go through an "I'm downloading a program, are you sure" dialog box.

while i agree that oen should use the tool for the job, that in it self is kinda hard, especially with wpf/SL..

Silverlight issuposed to be a subset, but it isnt. they keep adding new features that are not available in wpf, while leaving out things from wpf that you'd really need in silverlight (such as proper TPL support)

3d is a very the perfect example of this.. SL5 will have fat better 3d support via XNA than wpf ever had. so what to choose? not so easy anymore..

this is really the problem with these two platforms, they need to be unified. devdev has talked about that for a long time,  but never delivered :/ for every step towards unifacation, a bunch of new features gets added to silverlight but not made available in wpf, even as external libraries

I don't understand. Didn't the author of the blog post get the memo? MS has quite some time ago said that SL is no more a Flash killer (due to platform availability). The actual wording was: for reach use HTML/HTML5, otherwise use SL. I may have misunderstood the message. If that is what MSFT said, what was the point of the article?

One more thing which I haven't found an answer anywhere. Is/Will SL5's 3D API be supported on the Mac?

EDIT: grammer

Sep 09, 2010 at 7:36 AM, rhm wrote

*snip*

Actually, I've overstated that complaint in the case of WPF because you do have the FlowDocument there - not as powerful as HTML, but useable for most scenarios.

In WPF, FlowDocument is what you're supposed to use to do an HTML like document, WPF as a whole is more of an application-centric rather than document-centric platform. Which is why I think it more fits the need of app development than does HTML.

Plus, if anything doesn't exist in WPF you can create it on your own from scratch, and you can't really do that in HTML. WPF is just a much more powerful, much more flexible platform. HTML has a rigid DOM, WPF just is a very abstract platform, with some defined controls.

If the worst nightmares were true that Microsoft is moving to the HTML5 DOM, and they appear not to be, we would be sacrificing a lot of flexibility on the dev end.

17 hours ago, Deltakosh wrote

To add to this discussion, a technical comparison to help make a choice for a
given project:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eternalcoding/archive/2011/06/13/html-5-vs-silverlight-5.aspx

Thank you for the link. Please just open a new thread next time because it is harder to detect a dead thread and tracing the current topic that you started.

BTW, SL5? Kind of don't want to install the beta. Unable to view the stuff unless I update, but, I prefer the final release. Thanks for the link still.