WPF XBAP

Posted By: Charles | Jul 17th, 2006 @ 1:56 PM | 79,673 Views | 22 Comments

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WPF XBAP? What the heck is that? Well, find out all about this WPF-based technology right here as our Channel 9 special correspondent Dr. Sneath chats with XBAP Program Managers Lauren Lavoie and Karen Corby.

Get more info on this technology here.

Tag: WPF

Rating:

Sampy
This will be the sixth time we have destroyed it and we have become exceedingly efficient at it

One of my final acts as a member of the VB team was to work in getting support for this into the next version on Visual Studio. Good to see it getting some air time.

mawcc
Make it so

XBAP and Flash (especially with the new Adobe Flex 2) seem to be competing technologies in a lot of ways. Can anyone familiar with both technologies point out the differences, dis-/advantages of the two (aside from the obvious ones like lack of platform independence of WPF - at least now - and lack of 3D capabilities of Flash).

AdityaG
OMG VISTA FTW LOLZ!!1one

I think the biggest different is that WPF has a powerful "backend" of sorts, i.e., you program in something like C# and VB.NET instead of Actionscript. Sometimes that in itself is quite nice. I am an avid Flash user and this sort of stuff is nice to see (Flash will still probably rule because of its cross-platformness, but eh).

serishema
The Last Hacker Chick

Very cool. I'm excited about the possibility of doing a demo of my Jakira Studio project (a WYSYIG development environment for 3D games) as an XBAP as a way to still offer a demo but not have the problems offering a trial version download which will enivitably be cracked.

The extensive 3D support in WPF makes it the logical UI choice for the full version of the application as well.

erik_
Tablet Power

Great interview, Thanks!
Second screen of the first demo looks cool, 3d 3d Smiley

It's great that this also works on apache, so there is no need for IIS when it is not availible.

Is there a some sort of yes/no diagram, to see what you need? Because with all this different new things it gets kinda complicated to pick the correct one for a project without putting time into the comparing. So I can just take 5 minutes to answer yes/no questions to see what I probaly need for my project. (When do I use loose xaml, XBAP, WPF/E, ASP.NET/Atlas, just html etc. )

Because with all this new names it gets kinda confusing if you do not follow this on daily base. I though this was all called WPF/E, but now it seems there is a difference between them.

I assume xbap works also in the object tag, instead of the iframe tag for usage with xhtml strict. Is this correct?

BSalita

What are the XBAP websites?

Tim Sneath

Hi all,

A couple of places you can go for more information about XBAPs:

Karen has some nice demos of XBAPs on her blog, as you've seen. Check this post out in particular.
The WPF Blog has a ton of small XBAP samples.
My colleague Karsten posted a great entry on how to enable XBAPs for full-trust (i.e. accessing APIs outside the sandbox).
MSDN has a slightly dated article that introduces XBAPs (the contents are good, but it uses the obsolete term WBA to refer to a XAML Browser Application).
Lastly, check out this self-paced lab that walks through the creation of a XBAP.

If you've got an XBAP to share, please post to this thread - we'd love to hear about it.

Thanks for watching the video - we had fun making it.

Tim

ryanstewart

This is an awesome video, and I'm suprised that XBAP has flown under my radar for so long. Very cool stuff.

Mawcc - I think you're right that XBAP and Flex 2 are going to be big competitors. I'd always seen WPF as a competitor to Adobe's Apollo project - http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo but this is all (or most) of the benefits of WPF without having to worry about the desktop integration.

Very interesting stuff going on.

-Ryan
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/

lazyfish

Hi,

How would one create an XBAP app like Flex RTMP messaging application? Could the sandbox model allow you to execute some communication code done in WCF peer-to-peer or NetTCP channel? I'd like to know if it is possible to develop distributed simulation or MMOG (Masssive Multi-Player ON-line game ) with XBAP.

Thank you.