Yeah, like i mentioned earlier, XBAP could be argued as being the first prototype to Silverlight as historically speaking WPF came out, then XBAP was a pitch for "Click Once Deploy" thinking but given the elevated trust issues etc it never got as much traction. We then went back to the drawing board per say and came up with WPF/E (aka Silverlight) and from there it mutated more from its core principles around extending the desktop to remote http like capabilities into being a full blown plugin vs flash opportunity.
Once Silverlight got traction the WPF funding overall dried up fast, as less attention was given to .NET Desktop and more to X-plat, X-browser and x-device visions of the future. Today, it still stands that way but more confusion with WinRT/Win8 vision starting to creep in day by day. Its essentially the same ideas just executed differently and by mostly a different org tree (although a lot of the teams have moved around the place between Azure and XAML/WinRT) its still same one-trick pony at the end of the day. Silverlight isn't going to have another release, if it does have a future release (big if) it will be mostly just what WPF was recently -- a few additional features that were mostly derived from internal to Microsoft needs than external customer feedback / needs / roadmap trajectories.. Silverlight has a commitment of 21yrs support agreement in place, which means that Microsoft will support it should it have security issues etc only, doesn't necessarily mean that Silverlight support will be available in future generations of Visual Studio or something like that (i still think it would take 2 releases of VS before it totally drops off). It also doesn't mean Silverlight will be cast into future product roadmaps around next generation tooling either, basically what you have in front of you is all you're likely to get (with some minor touchups). Going forward, having remote access to the CLR via XBAP/SL is probably a little over-rated given the ubiquity of WPF funny enough. All those pretty Windows Vista / Windows 7 and at times XP machines out there is ripe for the picking provided your users are ok with the UAC punch in the face :)... Blame out of browser for Silverlights end of life, the moment we jacked that bad boy into the feature list was essentially the day Windows team got the most nervous.. the idea of ignoring IE and Windows on competing platforms like Apple / *NIX sent a massive "thanks for your time, you're done" old skool thinking. Even as we were planning it as a feature we kept saying "video offline" hoping and praying it won't catch everyones full attention on its actual capabilities :)... yup.. blew that one huh :) --- Regards, Scott Barnes http://www.riagenic.com On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 12:50 PM, Greg Keogh <g...@mira.net> wrote: > Greg H, Scott,**** > > ** ** > > A bit more reading soon revealed that XBAP is not that popular and it has > lots of hoops to jump through.**** > > ** ** > > The reason I asked about this was because a Borland C++ coding colleague > knocked-up a WPF demo app with some Visifire charts and a few controls, > then ran it in the browser. It looked quite nice and was easy to code so > they got all exciting thinking this was the way to go. I had to sober them > up and point out where their demo fits into the bigger picture. I have > since created a Silverlight 4 replacement demo.**** > > ** ** > > Hmmm ... so what is the future of Silverlight? We’ve got a fair investment > in it.**** > > ** ** > > Cheers,**** > > Greg**** > > ** ** >
