WPF/E competition

published on
March 29th, 2007
by ego

Yesterday was a fine day that ended with a talk about the WindowsVista.si website. It’s made with WPF/E technology and is made to mimic the look & feel of the real Vista operating system. A great showcase of the technology.

There’s been much talk about WPF. The whole Windows Foundation Platform seems to be competition to the Adobe Apollo platform. They’re both made to create desktop applications. Apollo seems to be on top with the cross-platformness while Microsoft is putting its hopes on the size of the Windows developer community.

When we come ‘down’ to WPF/E (the E stands for Everywhere), the competitor everyone is talking about is Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. They both solve a lot of common problems - animation, multimedia, drawing - stuff that you can’t do in HTML. But when you look under the hood of WindowsVista.si you’ll find there’s a bunch of JavaScripts that seem to do all the magic. And the code looks much like when you’re working with the infamous tag.

This was also confirmed by the developer of the page - due to the limitations of the current plugin and it’s work with XAML everything on the page is dynamically created with JavaScript and is not present in the source XAML file. Since there are no components available he actually wrote all the controls himself - tabview, scrolling, panes, menus, windows,…

Two things come to mind:

  1. Direct3D vs OpenGL battle that went on about a decade ago
  2. document.layer vs document.all and the time of the DynamicDuo

Seems like a good idea would be to write a library that will seamlessly switch between WPF/E, and Flash whether they’re present or not. Especially since the tag will obviouslly never be trully cross platform (at least for a while) and that WPF/E doesn’t yet have a plugin for all platforms & browsers. Then again - what’s wrong with Flash?

Opinions

  1. posted on
    March 30th, 2007
    by Marko

    At first I liked your idea and I guess it’s still a good one, if you want to make yourself known in Javascript development community.

    But more I think about it, more I find the idea of bridging to different, but both proprietary, technologies, a bit repulsive.

    What I’d like, is a better support for SVG in browsers, but I doubt I’ll get it anytime soon.

  2. posted on
    March 30th, 2007
    by id

    Nobody said that becoming famous does not include repulsive stuff. I guess SVG is too much for “the web” - then it would almost be the same as “mobile web” when the screens get higher resolutions.

Express your opinion

My name is Marko Mrdjenovič and I’m a web developer and a manager from Ljubljana, Slovenia (N 46° 03.246,W 14° 30.265).

I work at Parsek Zemanta, I’m a WaSP ILG member and I’m also the program lead at local weekly talks Spletne urice.

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