WPF vs XBAP vs Silverlight... which suits business applications?

.net wpf silverlight xbap business-application
Mark Carpenter picture Mark Carpenter · Jul 21, 2009 · Viewed 16.1k times · Source

I'm pretty familiar with a lot of the ins and outs of full fledged WPF client applications. I know that WPF client applications supports the full .NET Framework 3.5, allows for hardware acceleration of 2D and 3D graphics, theming, templating, styling, triggers, the works.

What I'm not clear about is what features, and/or niceties are either present or lacking in XBAP and Silverlight applications. I've heard that XBAPs are intrinsically limited in certain ways due to security concerns, but that's about it.

I know for a fact that WPF is robust enough to be used in full-scale business applications, but what about XBAP and Silverlight? What are the significant capabilities and limitations of each? Do either of them lack features that would render them useless when used in a business application?

Answer

Bryan Legend picture Bryan Legend · Aug 11, 2009

I tried to do XBAP development for about 18 months full time for a fairly ambitious project and absolutely hated it.

There are many undocumented limitations, such as not being able to set a custom mouse cursor. MS forgot to tell anyone about that one and a hundred others. I'm very averse to sandboxing now because of that minefield.

Combined that with the deployment nightmares (still to this day there's not a good story for Firefox, even after 3.5 SP1 there's still problems), I honestly believe that MS is doing everything it can to kill XBAPs in favor of Silverlight. I don't blame them, just wish they'd have been more open about it.

I would avoid XBAPs like the plague. It's a dead scenario with no future. Wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they were deprecated soon.

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