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John Rayner's Blog (2006-2010)

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WPF Here, There and Everywhere (or An Introduction to WPF/E)

EDIT: I became a SharpFellow and so this blog post has moved  

There's been some noise recently about WPF Everywhere (or WPF/E), a technology which was announced at PDC05 and Joe Stegman from Microsoft demonstrated at MIX06.  Here I'm going to collect together a few web resources about this technology.

So what is it?  According to Mike Harsh's Blog:

It is a cross-platform, cross-browser web technology that supports a subset of WPF XAML.  WPF/E also has a friction-free install model and the download size we’re targeting is very small.  WPF/E supports programmability through javascript for tight browser integration.  The WPF/E package also contains a small, cross platform subset of the CLR and .NET Framework that can run C# or VB.NET code.

So that sounds interesting, but what can you do with it?  These screenshots are also taken from Mike Harsh's blog:

Here's a transparent vector image with a clock that animates on top of the background.  And it's being displayed in Firefox.

And to show the flexibility of a markup-based UI, here's a simple Notepad type application.  In a browser.  The user can enter some XAML and the WPF/E browser plugin is set to display this via JavaScript.

So this is very interesting, but how simple is it to develop and what can you do with it? Tim Anderson has published a great article which gets into some of the nuts and bolts of developing with WPF/E and outlines some of the things you can and can't do with it.

 Interestingly, Microsoft seem to be having a small change of philosophy, as indicated by the "E" in WPF/E.  Specifically, this technology will not be limited to Internet Explorer or the latest incarnation of Windows and will not even be limited to Microsoft operating systems!  Microsoft will be providing a browser plugin which is cross-platform.  They are specifically targetting IE, Safari and Firefox running on Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista, as well as Firefox and Safari running Mac OS X.  Apparently they are aiming for a download size of 2MB, so it shouldn't even be too onerous for most users to install.

Of course there is no official release date, but Joe Stegman posted a blog entry on 12 Nov 06 in which he said a CTP will be available "soon".

So a roundup of other useful links:

Published 28 November 2006 11:00 by john.rayner
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Comments

 

Anthony.Steele said:

Wow, that's cool as anything.

But if you think about it, it's not totally unexpected. Microsoft is seeing upcoming competition from online word-processors, spreadsheets and other tools which are generally free and run in a browser. Not to mention how the Firefox browser is increasingly integrating richer display technologies like SVG and actionscript. MS needs to be in that space, so it's not unexpected that MS would want to develop a leapfrog technology to bring people back into the fold.  

November 29, 2006 13:08
 

John Rayner's Blog said:

The Dec 2006 CTP of WPF/E is now available for download. If you&#39;re interested in this, you&#39;ll

December 4, 2006 17:44
 

muqueca said:

Cool demo John. What's Conchango's capacity on developing a large scale solution for the financial industry? I'm currently assessing partners in NY. Thanks.

April 5, 2007 20:22
 

John Rayner's Blog said:

EDIT: I became a SharpFellow and so this blog post has moved The Dec 2006 CTP of WPF/E is now available

March 16, 2010 00:59
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