Looking at the innovation driving inside Silverlight, it is getting more attention then the former WPF. However having very similar syntax and .NET as base platform, both WPF and Silverlight are very different in approach, design and use. Today lot of developers live in dilemma of WPF vs Silverlight and it has now become a great trade off as similar to speed vs size.

Lets compare the need and features of both and make the trade off very easy to understand.

History of Microsoft Development Platform

We all loved Visual Basic, what did it provide? a rapid development platform to make quick business applications. By business applications I mean, the one to track your purchases, your activities which are just probably relational database and reports. Business Application makers didn’t have to worry about device drivers, system services, hardware and component versions.

Visual Basic provided very thin layer of application development for rapid turnaround time of small scale but huge in demand business applications. These applications require very less programming language expertise but more of business expertise. But it had limitations, you could not create a huge resource intensive application like CAD programs, Media editing programs, servers, games etc.

On other hand we had Visual C++, a huge development framework with possibility to do almost everything that was possible on Windows Operating System. Where you could fulfill need of any program, be it CAD, games, media editing, or servers etc.

But the development time required was very high, performance was great and the intelligence required to create system applications was very high. Getting talent to build such applications weren’t easy and even it is not easy today, because you need real in depth knowledge of how every part of the system functions. There is more dependency upon device drivers, component versions and there was no drag and drop.

Apart from any other platforms existed so far, Microsoft clearly and distinctly divided development into two major categories. Rapid vs System, or Native vs Thin applications.

Evolution of .NET

Ever since c# came into existence, we started seeing quick shift from tedious MFC/COM/ATL to c#, because all technologies were simply extension of c/c++ and each needed separate runtime to exist. Even still today, some of my components are written in ATL/COM and compiling them in newer version of Visual Studio is always pain. Compilation time is huge.

Where else, .NET based project took less time to compile, even the 1.0 versions are still in use and still in good shape.

Earlier it was expected that it will only replace the Visual Basic segment of programming, but somehow all devs started liking it and preferred it as an alternative to ATL/COM/MFC as its native capability and speed provided easy development and quick turnaround.

Windows Forms did provide an alternative to Visual Basic. But there was lack of more powerful, GUI interface in .NET. So came WPF. Not only this, .NET being neutral, the compiled apps are independent of 32 bit or 64 bit platforms.

Windows Presentation Framework

As we clearly see, Microsoft has its plan to make WPF as its primary GUI framework against all Win32 components. WPF is very easy to write as it is very simple XML, XML is very easy to read, and its very easy to organize, even the editors and compilers need less overhead in parsing and taking decisions based on XML.

The challenge here was to imitate almost everything that existed in Win32 inside WPF, and WPF became very feature rich, but once again it requires more intelligence to write complicated and big applications. Having talent already expert in HTML+JS area, and transforming them into WPF talent was little difficult.

Plus the way WPF was built, it was built more tight coupled with system operating system, just like the way MFC/ATL/COM were built. But WPF is very fast and very rich in features. It is now possible to write CAD, games and such high performance applications in WPF which can utilize latest hardware technologies.

And it is exact alternative for COM/ATL/MFC today.

Silverlight

Realizing that converting HTML+JS and Visual Basic devs to WPF was more challenging, silverlight pop in to existence, Which is very light weight, a smaller counterpart of WPF, although the syntax remains same, the ability to develop apps are limited in silverlight as it is not very tightly coupled with operating system.

However, you can develop apps pretty fast, but only focused on business logic, which here is one step ahead amongst all being platform independent. The devs are not required to have in depth knowledge of system, nor silverlight are more dependent on hardware, resources or other components.

But you cant develop high performance apps like CAD, games and media editing apps.

Indeed, it is an exact alternative for Visual Basic.

Conclusion

You need to choose WPF when you are creating any application of following type,

1. Interfaces with custom hardware.
2. You need to control memory and control the performance of app.
3. Create application that requires very high memory, CAD programs etc.
4. Connect to system components and used to manage system, hardware.
5. Want to connect to native system via COM/DLL interfaces.
6. Media (Audio/Video/Picture) editing applications.
7. Where your target audience can download and install .NET platform easily.

However you can use Silverlight for following alternative type of applications,

1. Provides smooth and quick animation on the web.
2. Make Rapid Business Applications, which can connect to your enterprise apps.
3. Make typical CRUD applications.
4. Registration, Dashboard type of applications.
5. Lightweight gaming and interaction websites.
6. Run in browser, with very small installation needed.

Coming Up:

UI Atoms from NeuroSpeech, a set of controls to develop rapid business applications on both WPF as well as Silverlight. A true alternative for DataForm on Silverlight and WPF, to have unified coding for Business Apps. Please click here to check the preview.