Clearing Up Some Info About "WPF/E"
I saw a post by Mike Harsh clearing up some of the information about “WPF/E” and thought it was worth passing on. I think the codename, which has an association with WPF causes some issues with people evaluating the technology. In one sense, WPF/E is appropriate because both WPF and WPF/E use XAML to render the user interface, but WPF/E is a very, very different animal. And it’s one that is a lot more accessible to people on different platforms. Mike covers the requirements:
Just to clear things up, WPF/E does not have any system requirements besides a supported OS and browser. The WPF/E runtime does not require an install of the .NET Framework. It doesn’t require an install of Windows Media Player. The 1.1 MB Windows install includes an XML parser, image codecs, media codecs, a media pipeline, a text rasterizer, animation and vector support, javascript language binding, a downloader and ActiveX and Netscape plug-in wrappers for various browsers.
For me, “WPF/E” has been one of the more interesting technologies from Microsoft but I had a discussion tonight that made it even more interesting. I really wish I could sneak into TechReady.
[tags]WPF/E, Mike Harsh, WPF, Microsoft[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
February 9th, 2007 at 4:36 am
Nahhh you’d hate TechReady, listening to MS staff prattle on about all the internal ongoings of Microsoft and trade secrets
hehehe.
February 9th, 2007 at 5:13 am
Yeah, I hate stuff like that.
February 9th, 2007 at 7:46 am
Here’s my big question - if I create something for the browser, using WPF/E, is it immediately portable to WPF? I always assumed it was, but maybe that’s because of the product names.
Cheers,
David
February 9th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
David, nope, not right now. The assets are a special version of XAML that won’t cross over seamlessly and all of the WPF/E coding is JavaScript, which wouldn’t port. When Managed Code is implemented, it might be easier to do, but I still don’t think you could immediately port it to WPF.