Comments on: WPF/E First Release Available

By: Jinishans

Jinishans — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:23:11 +0000

Well,

Now after the Feb CTP of WPF/E, it’s almost certain that M$ wants to make WPF/E as the defacto for web app. Flash / Appallo cant compete with that i feel. They say more to come. Already there’s support for all browsers in Win & Mac. Linux will follow suit.

By: brian

brian — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 22:24:45 +0000

WPF + WCF = web applications that look like windows apps.

By: Philippe

Philippe — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 08:19:00 +0000

Well people still seem to not understand that Flex 2 is basically free and that Flash Actionscript 2&3 is much much much better than the browser’s Javascript…

By: Metal

Metal — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 02:35:40 +0000

Sean Francisco Smith wrote:
>Flex is a great tool, that for outpaces the current competition, but you have to buy the whole stack ($20K)

You should look at flex builder 2, which costs around $700.
Or you could just download the command line compiler from Adobe for free.

I wonder which technology the AJAX/standards/Web 2.0 people are going to hate more though.
Microsoft .net vs Adobe Flash? Tough call.
Maybe we can pretend they don’t exist.
Quick, someone add support for WPF/E to the firefox extension FlashBlock!

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:35:11 +0000

@John Hann
Oh man…I can’t wait until the Ruby CLR is finished. Ruby is such an elegant and fun language (it became my favorite language after working with Rails), but unfortunately it is not currently very useful. .NET will allow Ruby to be able to do pretty much everything. Plus, if there’s one thing that open source technologies lack, it is GOOD documentation; Microsoft can fix that.

By: Sean Francisco Smith

Sean Francisco Smith — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:11:09 +0000

I don’t think it’s an Adobe killer just yet. Adobe is pretty well embedded in design agencies for high end tools. On the other hand, Adobe is shooting themselves in the foot for the Enterprise market. Flex is a great tool, that for outpaces the current competition, but you have to buy the whole stack ($20K)- and it outputs to Flash only. Laszlo is free (there is a support charge) and renders to Flash AND DHTML.

I suspect that MS will win the usual corporate market from MS zombies who know nothing else and see it as a “safe bet”. Adobe will continue to dominate the design houses. innovation will come from the Open-Source world.

By: John Hann

John Hann — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 15:27:09 +0000

For those of you who think this is about MS versus Adobe, think again. This is their opus magnus. This is about MS versus Linux, Apple, Ajax, HTML, open source software, and open standards.
.
It’s how MS will secure their stronghold over enterprises: WPF/E will never have the integration features of WPF running on XP and Vista.
.
It’s how they will maintain IE’s dominance: IE will run WPF, not just WPF/E.
.
It’s how they will “take back the web”: by the time similar “open” efforts catch up (e.g. Laszlo), it will be too late.
.
They have even been removing objections from developers: you will soon be able to write WPF applications in Javascript, Ruby, Perl, and Python.
.
Say goodbye to HTML, CSS, and Ajax and say hello to XAML. :-(

By: CrackWilding

CrackWilding — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 14:26:21 +0000

A couple people ave asked how Flash is any better. Well, how about 96%+ market penetration? Personally, except maybe for experiments, I’m not going to deploy production code on anything that isn’t native. Ok, Flash isn’t native, but it’s as close as you’re going to get. If YouTube can get sold for a billion bucks plus and their whole model depends on Flash, then I can use it for my little clients. Until this reaches a market penetration of higher than 90%, it may as well not exist.

That said, if it spurs Adobe to improve Flash, more power to them.

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 08:35:20 +0000

@Jifka
I hate Flash. Primarily I hate it because it is often used in situations where it is entirely unnecessary (anyone who uses Flash for a navigation system should be shot…figuratively). That’s not to say it doesn’t have its uses…I think it is a great tool for promotional sites and I’ve grown to love those Flash movie players since they provide a legitimate solution for a problem in that they abstract all of the different media players and plug-ins that are normally required.

And no, I’m not anti-MS. In my opinion, Microsoft has done nothing but release outstanding software development tools and technologies in recent years (C#/.NET especially). However, I’d be surprised to see a Microsoft article on this or any related blog with a high rating. My theory is that many people out there hold grudges for the shortcomings of IE as well as that many come from a Mac background that tends to bake in a hate for Microsoft.

By: Will Sahatdjian

Will Sahatdjian — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 01:57:26 +0000

This looks very cool…was working well on Firefox and the video codec looks nicer than Flash’s. If anything, it is definitely nice to have an alternative. Only good can come from some competition with Adobe.

By: Bertrand Le Roy

Bertrand Le Roy — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:41:48 +0000

Mark Haliday said: “it is ActiveX re-packaged because .NET is built upon COM)”
Err. What?? Come again? Where did you get this funny idea?

By: arnoud

arnoud — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 20:10:53 +0000

smart move and why not? Like Jifka mentioned Flash is also an ActiveX plugin. From a developer perspective this is interesting. Learning WPF could help me create attractive websites and realy cool windows applications. Now they only have to port it to Linux and help the mono guys to make an open source implementation. Nothing wrong with a bit competition for Adobe

By: Jifka

Jifka — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:45:41 +0000

For those of you concerned with running anything non-native, what are your feelings on Flash. How is this any different from what Adobe has done? Not trolling for flames, but an honest discussion. Is it simply an anti-MS bias or is the technology really lacking something?

By: Andrew Herron

Andrew Herron — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:44:59 +0000

Plante: I don’t think Microsoft could get away with doing this, or at least, not without their own fear that Adobe would file an anti-trust lawsuit on them. Much as was done with their media player.

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:36:09 +0000

Well, I hate using anything that isn’t native, but it is pretty impressive.

By: DigitaLink

DigitaLink — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 17:18:56 +0000

I’m still waiting to see if this works with linux computers. So far, everything I’ve read says Windows and OSX. (And not older Windows, only XP and up!) Sooooooooooooooooooooooooo … why on earth would I want to develop ANYTHING for WPF/E when the E doesn’t REALLY mean everywhere … only “Everywhere Microsoft lives”.

Sorry, isn’t the point of cross-platform, standards-compliant programming for the web to AVOID another (re)Active-X fiasco? Sorry M$, this cowboy will never lasso this new piece of malware in the making.

By: Noel

Noel — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:47:50 +0000

This reminds me of Netscape vs. MS back in the days. I think Adobe pushed MS buttons by projects like Flex, hijacking Flash for web applications. If they follow the Netscape model and mind their own entertainment business they should be OK!

By: Jonathan Bond-Caron

Jonathan Bond-Caron — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:33:29 +0000

The demos are impressive but it will be interesting to see the perfomance of live demos. It doesn’t seem lightweight to me.

By: Mark Haliday

Mark Haliday — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:25:14 +0000

Hmmm…. Do we really need this? Is Microsoft that paranoid that they are going to lose their monopoly so they have to tie everything back to this modern day ActiveX control in a webpage tactic? (and yes, it is ActiveX re-packaged because .NET is built upon COM).

By: Philippe

Philippe — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:28:12 +0000

It’s only 1Mo – nothing to be frightened of. An interesting point is that you develop it in plain Javascript so it can be used as a very efficient UI for an Ajax application.