Newbie question - Silverlight Studio and Shared Library for Silverlight Forum

Posted 12 years ago by 7Alpha7

Hello,

I mostly develop with win forms. However, I plan to move to WPF soon. I read somewhere that Siverlight is WPF everywhere. So my questions are :

- Why is there a WPF library and a Silverlight library if Microsoft claims that Silverlight is WPF everywhere ? How comes it's not the same library ?

- What are the differences between a WPF app and a Silverlight app ? Is it possible to host a WPF app in IE via Silverlight without changes ?

- If not (what I suspect, or you would not provide two different libraries), what is the workload to port a WPF app to Silverlight ?

thank you.

[Modified at 12/21/2011 07:39 AM]

Comments (2)

Posted 12 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA

1) While WPF and Silverlight share a lot of similar concepts, Silverlight is effectively a subset of what you can do in WPF. Silverlight will run in any major browser at this time but it has less overall functionality available than WPF. WPF runs as standalone Windows apps or as XBAPs (in the IE browser only). Silverlight code will generally port easily to WPF but not always vice-versa since WPF has additional capabilities not found in Silverlight.

2) WPF and Silverlight are completely different platforms, each with their own runtimes. You should google comparisons between the two to find out which is best for your scenario. The web has a ton of information on this subject. You'll find things like:

http://wpfslguidance.codeplex.com/releases/view/30311
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/11/WPF-Silverlight

3) Per above, porting WPF to Silverlight is not generally easy unless you designed your WPF app to be Silverlight compatible from the start. Going the other way is much easier.

Actipro Software Support

Posted 12 years ago by 7Alpha7

Thank you for the explanation. As far as I can see, there's not much gain to invest in Silverlight since the XPAB capability with the WPF paradigm provides the same benefits (besides the fact the host is IE only but in real world it's not a big deal to require it for a professionnal use).

So for me Silverlight has lived. Or I'am wrong.

The latest build of this product (v18.1 build 0233) was released 4 years ago, which was after the last post in this thread.