WPF For Beginners Clarification

Question

I am a Web developer in ASP.Net. Just I heard about WPF.Is WPF is for Desktop stuff or can i use all WPF controls in my web application?. When i visit the microsoft website it talsk much about designer tools (expression,blend),where can i get web developer perspective vidoes of WPF (Just drag the control on my form and set the properties for coding)?

Answer 1

Bottom line is this - WPF is a desktop technology. It's very closely related sibling - Silverlight requires a runtime much like Flash to run in the browser.

Silverlight components/controls/applications can be hosted inside of an asp.net application but the idea that your skills will just 'carry over' is grossly misguided. Silverlight uses the same core languages (C#, VB.NET etc and a subset of the .NET Framework) so to that extent that knowledge is valuable but both WPF and Silverlight use a declarative presentation language called XAML or (XML Application Markup Language). XAML is what HTML can only dream to be - it is extremely powerful and elegant and has rich support for things like binding.

From a tooling perspective - Expression Blend is really a XAML designer that can target Silverlight or WPF applications.

Videos can be found at

• http://windowsclient.net/learn/videos_wpf.aspx
• http://silverlight.net/learn/
• http://microsoftpdc.com/Videos

UPDATE: Ray makes some good points in the comments section about WPF controls and the XBAP type (Xaml Browser Applications)

Answer 2

If you are developing intranet applications, you might also consider WPF XBAPs(XAML Broswer applications). Clickonce enables very interesting deployment scenarios of WPF XBAPs in intranet environment.

WPF XBAPs can provide more features than silverlight because XBAPs can make use of full .NET framework. Having said that silverlight is really amazing for developing Line Of Business applications.

Hope this helps.