WPF/E

I’m trying out Microsoft’s answer to Flash: WPF/E (catchy name, guys). It looks like they are trying to muscle in on Adobe’s domination of the RIA space. Web apps like GMail are threatening the primacy of desktop applications, and Microsoft is trying to catch up to this trend (and the resulting threat to their main cash cows, Windows and Office). Dare Obasanjo points out, AJAX is a fundamentally limited platform.

Flex/Flash is the main alternative to AJAX; it’s cross-platform, and provides write-once run-anywhere development (although Linux support has always been iffy, and *BSD nonexistant – apart from OS X). But whereas Flash is delivered as a binary file, WPF/E apps are pure XML (in Microsoft’s XAML format) interpreted by the WPF/E runtime. This means no lock in to the development tools – although you are still locked in to the player (which is available for Windows and OS X); Miguel Icaza recommends open sourcing the player, but despite gestures here and there, that’s not really the Microsoft way. With Flex, you author the apps as XML (MXML), but they still need to be compiled before they can be used. Downloading the XML takes a lot longer, in the examples I’ve seen, than they would with the equivalent Flash apps, although to give the devil his due, it’s an immature technology, so things may improve over time – but this can only cut time off the parsing and executing, not the actual download …