Learn Silverlight or WPF first?

Question

It seems that Silverlight/WPF are the long term future for user interface development with .NET. This is great because as I can see the advantage of reusing XAML skills on both the client and web development sides. But looking at WPF/XAML/Silverlight they seem very large technologies and so where is the best place to get start?

I would like to hear from anyone who has good knowledge of both and can recommend which is a better starting point and why.

Answer 1

Should you learn ASP.NET or Winforms first? ASP or MFC? HTML or VB? C# or VB?

Set aside the idea that there is a logical progression through what has become a highly complex interwoven set of technologies, and take a step back and ask yourself a series of questions:

• What are your goals; how do you want to balance profit against enjoyment
• Are you short term oriented or in for the long haul
• Are you the type of person who likes to get good at something and do it a lot or do you get bored once you fully understand it?

The next and hardest step is to come to accept that any advice you are given is bound to be wrong; and the longer the time horizon the more likely it is to be incorrect. If the advice is for more than six to 12 months, the probability the advice is wildly incorrect approaches 1.

I can only tell you my story, quickly. In 2000 I was happy as a consultant working profitably in C++ on Windows applications, writing about ASP.NET and WinForms. then I saw C# and the world turned upside down. I never went back.

Two years ago I had the same kind of revelation, only an order of magnitude bigger, stronger and with more conviction about Silverlight. Yes, WPF is magnificent, and it may be that I'm all wet about this, but I believe in my gut that Silverlight changes everything. There was no doubt then and there is no doubt today that Silverlight is the most important development platform for Microsoft since .NET (certainly) and possibly since the switch to C++.

In a nutshell, here is why. I don't understand where its limitations are. With most platforms I do: you can do this, but you can't do that. WPF is a pretty good case in point, as was ASP.Net and WinForms and, well really everything until now.
With Silverlight, I don't see the boundaries yet. Silverlight has already leaped off the desktop onto phones, and I don't see any reason for it to stop there. Yes, it is true, it is bound by the browser, but I see that less as a jail cell than as a tank in which Silverlight will be riding over lots of terrain (it must be very late, I should go to bed).

In any case, for now, learning Silverlight is a gas, there is a lot of material on the Silverlight.net site, and what is the very best thing about learning Silverlight is that if you don't see what you need you can holler at me and I'll make sure you get it pretty quickly.

Enjoy, good luck and the dirty little secret is you'll be fine whichever you choose. It's all just software.

-jesse

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Jesse Liberty "Silverlight Geek"

Answer 2

I'd say go with Silverlight first!

I have programmed with WPF and Silverlight before.

But as Silverlight is a subset of WPF if you go in too deep and try to switch to writing Silverlight applications, you'll be scratching your heads looking for that "tag" you learned to love in WPF but is not available in Silverlight.

When you master the basic things in Silverlight first, the extra mechanism/trigger/whatever features in WPF will simply add to most of what you've already known.

Silverlight in WPF differs at the features level, not just some missing controls or animations. Take the WPF triggers mechanism for example, is not available fully in Silverlight.

So learning the smaller subset first, you can extend that knowledge to the full set later, but if you started at the full set and gets addicted to some of the niceties available, you'll have trouble down the line when someone asks you to port your designed-utilizing-WPF apps to Silverlight.

Answer 3

I'll go against the grain and say learn WPF first.

Here's my reasoning:

• Much more resources are available for WPF than Silverlight, such as books, blogs, and msdn documentation

  • WPF Books

• You're not dealing with a Beta, moving target

• You don't have to deal with working with only asynchronous calls

• Not limited by lack of features such as Merged Dictionaries, Triggers, TileBrushes, etc.

• You don't have to worry about re-learning to do things correctly because of lacks of features in SL

Answer 4

Silverlight is a stripped down version of WPF so it should have fewer things to learn inside. On the other hand, the two platforms have different targets (web & rich client) so I guess it depends on what app you're going to build.
If you just want to learn for yourself (no app in the close future) I'd pick Silverlight because it would be less to assimilate. Still, Silverlight is pretty much a moving target, much more than WPF, so you'll have to keep up with some changes from time to time (the joys of being an early adopter :)).
WPF has lots more stuff that you will probably want to use at some point but I would wait for the needs to arise first.