WPF/E, now Silverlight
The stuff previous known as WPF/E is now officially named Silverlight. Silverlight is supposed to be a direct competitor to Adobe’s Flash and Ajax-based applications.
A little bit disappointed with this official release since in their website, MS while repeatedly promoting the new mantra of Silverlight as a “cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media experiences and rich interactive applications” (you will see this mantra appear a few dozen times in Silverlight website), says Silverlight will support “all major browsers on both Mac OS X and on Windows” and MS is “gathering feedback from customers to help determine which platforms should be supported in the future”. Funny, they even need feedbacks to know that without Linux they cannot claim anything as cross-platform.
Another disappointment is that currently the only language supported by Silverlight is JavaScript. Anyway, while the support for .NET languages like C#/VB.NET is highly expected, this item is not really a pain point to me.
Buu,
Seems to me like Microsoft wants to promote XAML as the primary language to build WPF/E, although you can also use C#/VB. If you follow their examples or at least watch their demos, most are given in XAML. It’s just another case of how Microsoft abuses XML. I am very tired of XML being used as programming language instead of data exchange. I am also new to WPF/E, but from what I see so far, XAML is just a step backward since it mixes JS code with markup with styles.
Thanks for your opinions, Kevin.
IMO, XAML is a declarative presentation of the UI elements (like HTML, ASPX) and it is not necessarily replacing JS, C#, or VB as a programming language. And I think this is the right choice because usually the declarative markup is not only more concise but also more expressive than the imperative C#/VB code. If XAML were meant to be used to code program logic (e.g. Ant, iBATIS etc.), then I would agree with you that it was not a good idea at all.
I haven’t played much with WPF/E, but I believe you can both call inlined or external JS’ functions from XAML (aka code-behind). In the next release, XAML can call C# or VB.NET code as well, and I think this ASP.NET-like UI-logic separation is good enough.
Finally, I would agree with your last comment that it’s bad that WPF/E currently does not allow a separation between GUI elements and styles, something WPF does support. Hopefully MS will be working on that for the next release.
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