XBAP usage and maturity issues

Question

we're considering migrating our UI to XBAP. we've chosen XBAP despite knowing the clients must have .net pre-installed, since we're not targeting the masses but rather IT professionals in the corporate environment, and it's a way to preserve our investment (in a WPF based UI in a client-server architecture) and enjoy web deployment. however, we are concerned about the maturity of the platform/architecture and it's adoption.

do you know of any commercial applications out there using XBAP, and do you have any experience using it? can you elaborate on that experience?

also, as @Murph suggested, can you think of strong reasons to prefer clickOnce over XBAP (or the other way around)?

Answer 1

I've been doing an XBAP tool, also for internal corporate needs. It's pretty easy to rollout updates -- just update the server app version and the clients will be updated next time they connect. So, in this aspect its not very different from ClickOnce.

The main problem for us was the "partial trust" mode, that you have to obey. And it goes wrong in some very unexpected situations, like for example, some of our third-party WPF failed because they used WPF bitmap effects, which in turn used GPU shaders, which was considered as a security violation by the system and blocked. I'm not sure if that kind of problem is solved in ClickOnce. The rumors are the XBAP trust mode will be less paranoid in .NET 4.

Otherwise, I don't see any difference. At least the development of XBAP vs stand-alone WPF is all the same. (Note: Silverlight is different, it uses only a subset of .NET framework, which is separately installed and available for several platforms. XBAP requires Windows platform and .NET Framework 3+).