Hi,
I have been reading blogs on WPF/E and it's has got me pretty excited: I had a few questions on it:
1) I plan to use WPF/E to design a kind of user input form (WPF/E to get better user interaction - do something funky) - Can this be done
2) Can I make call to webServices from WPF/E application to process data, Is there any built in support
3) What are the things I could do in WPF/E which cannot be done in Flash - i.e. what is it that would drive people to migrate from Flash to WPF/E.
Thanks in advance.
Regard -
A..K
Questions on WPF/E
Helen999888
Not really, no.
At the moment, WPF/E doesn't have any user interface controls, nor any layout controls. That makes it rather difficult to build a UI, which is why all the demos you see are some type of clock.
Of course, with drawing primitives and mouse/keyboard events, you could build any sort of user form you cared to. But that's like saying you can build a video game using just the VGA registers and keyboard I/O instead of a 3D engine.
You don't realize how much code there is in something like a TextBox or a DropDownList until you try to write one yourself. Text positioning, undo buffers, that little flashing cursor where you're typing: Those things don't just code themselves. Not to mention inter-control interactions, cut-n-paste, input focus management, scrollbars -- you get the idea.
When you hit TAB and the focus moves to the next control.. When you click a menu and it interacts with you modally, then drops the focus back where it came from.. When you click "Open File" and a nice file dialog comes up.. None of those things is available in WPF/E at the moment.
The sort of application you could whip up in an hour using WinForms and .NET 2.0 would take you months using WPF/E.
Not per se, but you could probably shim something together using javascript's XMLHttpRequest.
In its current form, nothing. There's nothing WPF/E does which Flash doesn't do better. Flash also has a host of development tools available, whereas WPF/E has none -- though I believe you can use the CTP of VS2005 extensions of WPF ("Cider") and cut-n-paste the resulting XAML code into a place where WPF/E could get to it. And the Expression suite is in beta, though I've played with it and I thought Cider was better. Maybe I'm just used to Visual Studio.
Whether WPF/E is eventually going to become an application development environment is a matter of some conjecture. Some people from Microsoft hint that it will, but without some sort of timeline it could be the next WinFS.
If it happens, it's still a long way away. At the moment, WPF/E is a cross-platform media player that doesn't understand obscure formats like ".mp3"
Duncan Woods
My post on this may help. Also, see Mike Harsh's post here may help as well.
Related to web service support, we don't have built-in web service support, however you can use xmlhttp with JSON to do this fairly easily (I need to do a blog post on this...).
In terms of WPF/E maturity, our CTP is a preliminary version of what will be the V1 version of WPF/E - it's as immature as it will ever be. Don't assume this is it - it will grow into more and will be backed by the Microsoft developer and designer tools. But even without that, try building a WPF/E sample - all you need is a text editor the WPF/E plug-in and a web browser - so barrier to entry is about as low as it gets.
Joe