Silverlight Out of Browser technology and WPF ClickOnce on the surface have similarities. Easy and simple deployment, the ability to specify the level of trust access to the underlying host, etc.
What are the key issues I need to consider when choosing one over the other?
To put a finer point on it, I'll be deploying LOB apps on a corporate network running only windows computers.
The big one is cross platform compatibility. If you need you app to run on a mac as well as windows (not sure if Silverlight is supported in Linux yet) then use Silverligt. If you want to make an assumption that all your users will be in a windows machine then go WPF.
Obviously WPF has a much richer toolkit than silverlight so it may well be that silverlight just isn't an option. If I was just building for windows though I know my job would be easier in WPF.
Given that you are targetting a private infrastructure running Windows, two points worth thinking about
Wpf has a richer control tree, whereas Silverlight is a reduced set for compact size
Wpf requires .Net framework installed locally, whereas Silverlight has its own platform independent browser-based runtime
While your target platform will likely have the latest .Net framework installed, rendering this last point moot, keep in mind any updates to the framework [ie .Net4.0 and any future updates] may require a restart of the machine - which is a major pain point for businesses that demand constant-on stateful desktops [ie anything in finance, like banks and trading].
As with all problems, your requirements, not the technology, should inform your solution. :)
You mentioned trust access to the host which I think rules out Silverlight unless you want to run SL4 (beta).
We recently went through a lot of discussion about file system access. Silverlight 3 runs in a partial trust sandbox more or less. You can't maintain a pointer to files in the files system outside of your application's isolated storage. This was an issue for us as we wanted the user to be able to use the application to reference odds and ends on your file system. That said you can allow the users to load and save files from anywhere on the system but you just get/or push the file stream and (to the best of my knowledge) don't have access to the folder or file path information.
Silverlight 4 (in beta) has support for your application running in full trust mode. I haven't played with this yet however and can't speak to how well it works.
In talking with a lot of people who work with both Silverlight and WPF, even those who are excited about Silverlight and push for it strongly, I hear a lot of the say fairly emphatically that if you are going to be developing exclusively for a full-trust Windows environment, WPF is hands-down the obvious choice.
That's not to say that Silverlight is an inferior product or that there aren't times will Silverlight will be the clear winner. But when you say "I'll be deploying LOB apps on a corporate network running only windows computers," it sounds like WPF is the clear winnder.
You could decide to go down the Silverlight route in anticipation of all of the great new OOB feature os SL4. I've even heard rumors that SL and WPF will eventually merge, so it may not even really matter, right? Well, I think what you'll find if you go with Silverlight is that some of the advanced features that you thought were there weren't there in the way you expected. For example, SL4 will be able to run in "Elevated Trust" (not full trust) and you might find this limiting at a frustrating point in the project where a lot of your code base is already in Silverlight.
Certainly keep your eyes on Silverlight, but for your current business case, WPF will likely be the best fit.
Related
Today, while I'm running a Silverlight project in the Internet Explorer by pressing F5 in Visual Studio 2012 in my Windows 8 machine, I found that McAfee started to block Silverlight XAPs (Which is loaded by Prism).
This leads me to think again about the future of Silverlight. I'm at the beginning of my LOB Application. Should I stop what I like to work in Silverlight and return back to WPF. I which that I can continue to develop in Silverlight until Windows 8 becomes rich like Silverlight. That is why I limit the Model and MVVM to PCL to be easier to be ported to WinRT in the future. Using await async and so...
Please advise me which is better for a LOB application that will run in three countries throw the Internet. Should I continue in Silverlight for zero deployment, or work in WPF or even Windows Forms and use clickonce?
The fact that McAffee blocked something has NOTHING to do with it's long term future. McAfee is nobody, they don't determine whether or not a specific technology can be used or not, or will be used in the future.
Silverlight seems to have reached a dead end, due to Microsoft realizing that if they create a multi-platform application environment, people might just stop using Windows.
WPF also seems to have been abandoned in favor or WinRT XAML, but of course WinRT XAML is not an option for us developers at the moment, simply because it is Windows 8-only, and our customers don't have Windows 8 or greater.
Besides, technically, WinRT-XAML seems to be really inferior to WPF XAML, and lacks many important features.
Of course winforms is completely useless and is not an option, unless you need to run your applications in my grandma's 80386 computer with an Hercules monochrome monitor
(exaggeration).
Seriously, that dead technology is not the answer to any of today's challenges. Things that you can do easily in any of the XAML-based technologies are either impossible or require a bunch of horrible hacks in winforms.
I suppose the definitive answer depends a lot on the usage scenario, for example:
Silverlight makes more sense if you have to publish your application in a web site and have anyone download it and use it.
WinRT XAML makes sense only if you target Windows 8, or want to create 'metro style' apps.
WPF makes sense if you want to create Windows Desktop applications, and have them deployed via ClickOnce or Windows Installer to a more limited and controlled set of users (because it needs installation of the .Net Framework, which Click-Once can deal with anyways).
winforms makes no sense whatsoever because it's a completely useless dinosaur technology that doesn't support anything.
Thank you very much for your answer and sharing your experience with me. I always try keeping WinRT as a strategy planning for each line of code I write. As I wish to migrate my code easily to WinRT in the future. The future is translated to me as may be within two years I may find myself in a situation that we will be targeted to migrate to something like Windows 9.
The best successful migration scenario - as I wish, it could be by increasing the usage of PCL at the client side as much as possible and test in a small piece of WinRT module.
We hope that Microsoft succeed in Windows 9.
I am sadly decided to shift to WPF instead of Silverlight in case that Silverlight depends on browsers that may not be supported in the future. As we here that Chrome, Safari and others are stopping supporting Silverlight. Why should I insist in relaying with such great technology that is dead before it finishes.
The main difficulties I could face in the future migration could be tied to two patterns:
- Prism.Regions: Windows Store has better than that.
- Prism.Modularity: Windows Store has no migration strategy to that.
At least at the moment I'm writing my thoughts Prism for Windows Store are far from implementing Regions and Modularity.
This is not a final answer but a clue of my what I should and should not to do.
I have been using WPF for a while, and I keep on realizing again and again that Microsoft invests its efforst in Silverlight, not in WPF (RIA Services, default theme, controls and more).
I thought it might be a good idea to migrate to Silverlight (i.e. creating standalone desktop apps with Silverlight 4.0), the question is whether this is possible or not.
BTW, I think LightSwitch applications are generated with Silverlight as standalone desktop apps.
From MSDN:
Silverlight 3 applications are no longer restricted to running in a browser. They can be run in a browser or it they can be detached from the browser and run from the desktop. These out-of-browser applications allow you to bring the richness of Silverlight 3 applications directly to the desktop without the restriction of running within a browser.
Link: Building An Out-of-Browser Client With Silverlight 3
It is possible to create standalone desktop apps(Out of browser apps) with silverlight version 3.0 or higher and it works great. Now it is also possible to install the out of browser app even without opening a browser as shown at this blog post .Silverlight is awesome and silverlight apps even run on MACs and Linux(limited support)
However, it is not true that Microsoft is only investing in silverlight. Microsoft is investing in WPF too. Though it is possible to create out of browser applications with silverlight, they have lot of limitations when compared to a full blown WPF applications.Dont forget that silverlight is just a subset of WPF, for example, silverlight doesnt have ADO.NET, Hardware device access etc. So if your application is merely a business application and you dont have to access hardware devices or database directly then silverlight might be an option, however if your application accessing client machines hardware resources directly then you are better off with WPF.
My suggestion is, If you know before hand that it is going to be a desktop application then go with WPF(or may be even XBAP). In my experience, useful applications grow with time, new features are always requested time to time. If in future,a feature is requested that cannot be accomplished with silverlight and can only be accomplished with WPF, then you will be in a big trouble because you need to rewrite your app in WPF and it will be hard for you to convince your CFO to allocate more fund just to implement one feature. Silverlight is not designed to develop desktop applications, its main goal is multi-platform support.
Silverlight 3 supports Out-of-Browser functionality.
Quote from Wikipedia silverlight page :
Silverlight 3 supports Out-of-Browser experiences, i.e., Silverlight applications can be installed to the system for offline access (provided the application manifest is designed to allow local installation) where they run outside the browser.
Also here is a quick howto
Out of browser applications have the same security restrictions as in browser applications.
With Silverlight 4 you can create full trust applications which have full access to the computer.
More on Network Security Access Restrictions in Silverlight
If you mean Out of Browser apps, certainly. The Seesmic Desktop 2 app is an excellent example of one of these apps, with it's own updating mechanism. Seems a no brainer to use the XAP/MEF plug-in Model and Silverlight in this manner.
Seesmic Desktop 2
We're developing an OOB app along the same lines, one internet download and you're done. You're not going to get exactly the same APIs as you get in WPF, though.
As others have pointed out, Silverlight apps can be installed to run 'out-of-browser', but even with elevated trust they still have significant restrictions on what they can do and certainly don't have "full access to the computer".
Creating an app from scratch, you may want to consider parallel Silverlight & WPF builds. The code can more-or-less be shared by adding the .cs files from one project (e.g. WPF) to the other (Silverlight) using "Add As Link". The XAML files cannot be linked this way and need to be duplicated, but that may not involve much more than copying & pasting, depending on your structure. There're good examples of this on the web.
Developing both types in parallel would likely involve a lot less effort than having to abruptly switch types at some point and discovering incompatibilities/limitations too late.
Given the list of new features announced in Silverlight 4, when is WPF still required?
WPF still has a lot fuller 3D rendering capabilities.
Also even though they announced enhancements to the commanding and binding capabilities, that's no guarantee that it will have the full ability that WPF currently has or will have in the next version
Edit: After playing around with Silverlight 4 beta, it looks like pretty much all of the new features (webcam, file access, full screen keyboard, COM interop, etc) only work when the application is elevated trust, and elevated trust can only be enable when running out of browser. Some of this may change by RTW, but for now, WPF still looks like the only way to do these things inside of a browser window
I've been using mostly XBAPs for browser deployments while waiting for a Silverlight version that includes WPF's full templating and data binding capabilities. Perhaps Silverlight 4 will do it.
Several things that Silverlight 4 definitely won't be able to do are:
Allow you to seamlessly integrate your WinForms and MFC user interface components with your application
Efficiently work with data file structures originally defined in C/C++ (with WPF you can simply copy the code across and easily replicate the original C++ code using unsafe and StructLayoutAttribute)
Include unmanaged C++ code in your application
I have not actually downloaded the Silverlight 4 beta yet, so this list is necessarily incomplete.
The next version of Visual Studio will not be written in Silverlight ;) I can't wait to write an Audio utility in WPF---and Silverlight must be sand-boxed away from the incredible Windows Audio subsystem. However, I can see the day when WPF will be called Silverlight (or perhaps the other way around).
When you don't want to depend on a browser to do your work, when you need full and fast access to the file system without prior confirmation, when doing interop with unsafe bits of code. These are the few I can think of, but they might be other reasons as well, depending on what features Silverlight 4 will really have and how well will they really work.
The applications we (in our company) write today use nothing that is not supported by Silverlight except for local TCP/IP connections without limitations.
This is the only reason we are using WPF.
If we could use Silverlight instead (desktop mode) we'd be able to give our customers
the choice of working on Mac (and linux) systems as well instead of being forced (by us?)
to use a recent version of Windows (you'd be surprised how many companies still use old (partially) unsupported versions).
Even in WPF we try to limit access to the system, we create our own sandbox and
try not to go outside of it. (Never require admin rights, never access stuff you don't have to)
So for what we do, Silverlight + real tcp/ip support would be more than enough...
but there is absolutely still room for WPF and I'm pretty sure it's here to stay.
It all depends on what you're building.
Silverlight will always favor small payloads over functionality. Strategically, Microsoft will attempt to out feature Adobe's offerings using Silverlight, while WPF will be competing against other heavy platforms. If you look at WPF 4 you'll notice a push towards heavier weight features. I try to keep in mind that WPF started out as Avalon which was intended to permanently displace Win32. I won't be surprised if one day Windows XX is "native" WPF and Win32 will be emulated.
If you want to do direct database access through ADO.NET that's not something you'll be able to do in Silverlight 4. Access to devices will still be limited although you will now have some printing support and webcam/microphone. I haven't heard anything about 64 bit support so if you want to offer a 64 bit version of your app you'll need WPF. I also think even if Silverlight 4 makes better use of the GPU, it still won't be to the level that WPF utilizes it.
There are also a ton of other assemblies in the .NET framework that Silverlight doesn't include so if you need any of those you'll need to go WPF.
Just like HTML5 will reduce the need for a plugin like Flash or Silverlight in some cases, Silverlight will reduce the need for WPF but there are still plenty of cases where you'll need it.
WPF is still required if you need to do extensive Rich Text (FlowDocument) editing. Silverlight 4 has the new RichTextBox, but it is limited to very basic content, and doesn't provide the full set of features that are available in FlowDocuments in WPF. A FlowDocument can effectively do what the WinForms RichTextBox can do; but if you only need the basics, a RichTextBox in Silveright may do what you need.
The bottom line is that silver light is limiting. So, if you are going to use a less capable technology you should have a compelling reason for doing so. The only one I can come up with, and it is a big one in some circumstances, is that Silverlight is more platform indifferent. I just can't imagine anyone wanting to bring the browser and all of it's headaches into a solution. There must be a good reason.
I have a small project that I will be working on shortly that collects employees time and what project the person was working on. Pretty straight forward. I was orginally going to work on it in WinForms but since im new to that I though maybe using Silverlight for the application since I will have a learning curve for each. Here is a couple of business requirements that i need to incorporate into the application.
-System will use an Access database hosted on a particular persons computer.
-Ability to generate and print reports
-Installed on the emploees desktop who will have access.
Would one technology be recommended over the other in terms of what I need to do. Here is a screen mockup of one of the pages I will need to create.
http://teewebco.com/images/main-copy.png
If you want access to the machine on which the application will run (e.g. to access a database, and to use printing), that pretty much rules out Silverlight, without jumping through a lot of hoops (e.g. having to install something on the user's machine anyway).
You say that WinForms will require a learning curve for you - well you might as well use WPF then, as it's a similar technology from the UI perspective as Silverlight. However, you can proably find a lot more resources online for WinForms though, and it's likely you'd be more productive in WinForms given its strong Visual Studio designer support.
Deployment with WinForms or WPF should be fairly easy with ClickOnce.
Since it's a local (desktop) app which needs to access a local resource (Access database), it's probably better to do winforms.
However, you might be better off doing this as WPF instead - it's more current than winforms.
Winforms and WPF are easier than Silverlight when you have to access a database because you can do it directly. If your install base uses only .net 2.0 then stick with WinForms, if you know they can install .NET 3.5 then try out WPF. Just be warned, there is more to learn with WPF and XAML but it's very rewarding especially if you want to get fancy.
Silverlight 3 lets your application to run on desktop as well.
So I'd write it on silverlight. Yet another technology to master.
Silverlight 3.0 beta has just been announced at Microsofts Mix Conference in Las Vegas.
Two features of the new beta are 3D-graphics and the ability to run applications outside of the browser, which to me seemed to be two of the major features that WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) previously offered over silverlight.
I am currently evaluating WPF and Silverlight for possible use in our companies future development activity, and this announcement has left me confused as to the intended direction of these two UI technologies and why I would choose one over the other.
Has anyone implemented a new application using WPF recently, and if so, what drove you to that decision? Given the announced changes to silverlight, Would your decision have changed had you made it now, and if not, why?
Any advice would be appreciated.
The biggest difference I find is the asynchronous model you have to adopt
in your Silverlight application.
It does seems like an advantage (and it can be), but it does make
life very difficult sometimes.
There are also some limitations that can be a real challenge like the absence
of print support.
I would recommend Silverlight over WPF when:
- There is no need for best possible performance (graphics included)
- Can get around the absence of print support (it will come, we just don't know when)
- Camera/Microphone support is not needed
- Can tolerate the assync app/development model
- Can tolerate limitations on WCF (no support for WS-Security at this point)
- There is no need to store huge amount of data on the client.
- There is no need to direct integration with client side applications like Office.
- Has a server to host your application
I would say the main difference is that WPF requires the client to have the .Net 3.0+ framework. Silverlight only requires the runtime. Now that being said, WPF is geared more for controlled environments such as an intranet. Silverlight is meant for the public web. Another difference is that Silverlight is cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux in the future & Cross browser). WPF is meant for Windows only.
The .Net framework can be a huge download for some users. Silverlight is only 4-5MBs. This is a big difference to run your app on the web, but not a big issue if its an internal application at your company.
Silverlight is Sandboxed which is meant for web use. So if your app requires more permissions you will need WPF.
There are also some differences between Silverlight code and WPF. But from what I've heard, the ultimate goal is to get a Silverlight to run inside of WPF with minimal code changes. But they aren't there just yet.
I have just worked on a WPF project that in hindsight we feel we might have chosen SilverLight for. It is probably more important to know the differences and select the one that is most appropriate for what you're doing.
Here's my starter for ten on some of the important differences - there were originally some differences in the available controls, but that has largely been smoothed out now.
Silverlight
Runs entirely on the client with AJAX
calls to the server for data
Can run on any server, including Windows and Linux / Apache
Uses COMPACT .NET framework
WPF
Runs on the client... usually calls services for data
Runs on Windows XP / Vista with .NET 3.5
Utilises the entire .NET framework
Silverlight is basically a stripped down version of WPF in order to make the runtime libary download as small as possible.
As a result, WPF simply has a lot more functionality available in it and tasks that are simple in WPF often become not so simple in Silverlight.
If running as a web app is not a requirement then the decision is a no-brainer - WPF all the way.
Has anyone implemented a new application using WPF recently, and if so, what drove you to that decision: Well since WPF was desktop only (or browser based using XBAPS - but that was more a deployment system than a real system) that was a good reason to it.
"Would your decision have changed had you made it now, and if not, why?" - No Silverlight, even on the desktop in v3, is still highly sandboxed and so certain functions are going to be hard/impossible to do due to the sandbox. Also the ability to use DirectX parts in WPF will still give another optimisation area which Silverlight and it's 3d won't be able to use.
It's worth noting that Silverlight's 3D is not the full 3D support of WPF, but only projection of 2D into 3D - i.e. take the 2D plane and allow rotation in X, Y & Z directions. WPF has full 3D modelling with materials, view ports, lighting and camera positional support etc.
I'm well along in the development of our first WPF app for release. Silverlight 3 looks great, but for this application I would still have chosen WPF. The application centers around presenting and manipulating very large sets of images hosted on a central server on our clients' networks. Additionally, the software update/change rate will be minimal. Mass import of new images from a local drive, no Internet connectivity requirements, performance concerns, etc. make this a project well suited for WPF.
One of our upcoming projects, however, will require many remote users to access a single data store on our network. The data they work with requires significant validation and error handling, so running that code locally is ideal. They will need the ability to work both on and offline and remain in synch (probably with SQL Data Services). SLOOB (Silverlight Out Of the Browser) will most likely be our choice for that one so they can have all the Silverlight advantages but use it like a regularly installed application, even without an Internet connection.
Both formats have their place: the trick will be to avoid using Silverlight for everything - we have more tools than just 1 hammer. :-)
Another difference is that with SL you only have one 'window', you can't have dialogs (they can be simulated but their size is limited to the main window) and you can't add multi monitor support.
If you have to interact with existing business applications (e.g. open a document in the archive viewer) you need to use WPF.
I recently have built several internal tool using wpf, and I chose it simply because It was easier for me coming from win32 work. I don't really think that the differences are major, and really... everything i have seen/heard indicates that porting between wpf and silverlight is quite easy.
Storage: You only have 25MB of isolated storage out-of-browser. If I remember correctly from some mix09 video, this limit is lower if your app is in-browser.
http://bliny.net/blog/post/Out-of-Browser-with-Silverlight-3.aspx
No FlowDocument: So there are limitations there too.