Yesterday was a fine day that ended with a talk about the WindowsVista.si website (now offline). It’s made with WPF/E technology and is made to mimic the look & feel of the real Vista operating system. A great showcase of the technology.
There’s been much talk about WPF. The whole Windows Foundation Platform seems to be competition to the Adobe Apollo platform. They’re both made to create desktop applications. Apollo seems to be on top with the cross-platformness while Microsoft is putting its hopes on the size of the Windows developer community.
When we come ‘down’ to WPF/E (the E stands for Everywhere), the competitor everyone is talking about is Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. They both solve a lot of common problems – animation, multimedia, drawing – stuff that you can’t do in HTML. But when you look under the hood of WindowsVista.si you’ll find there’s a bunch of JavaScripts that seem to do all the magic. And the code looks much like when you’re working with the infamous <canvas> tag.
This was also confirmed by the developer of the page – due to the limitations of the current plugin and it’s work with XAML everything on the page is dynamically created with JavaScript and is not present in the source XAML file. Since there are no components available he actually wrote all the controls himself – tabview, scrolling, panes, menus, windows,…
Two things come to mind:
- Direct3D vs OpenGL battle that went on about a decade ago
- document.layer vs document.all and the time of the DynamicDuo
Seems like a good idea would be to write a library that will seamlessly switch between WPF/E, and Flash whether they’re present or not. Especially since the tag will obviouslly never be trully cross platform (at least for a while) and that WPF/E doesn’t yet have a plugin for all platforms & browsers. Then again – what’s wrong with Flash?