Well, I finished my experiment with Silverlight, specifically Silverlight 3.  If you recall, the aim was prove to myself that I could translate my WPF skills into Silverlight and how quickly.

Mission accomplished! 

I made a number of Silverlight controls and small apps and I was very pleased with how easy that translation was.  Initially, i was going to make an Amazon widget, which I may still do at some point, but I abandoned it about 3 hours into doing so because by that time, I’d proven to myself that I could easily take what I know in WPF and downgrade them into Silverlight and what remained for that widget was more fine tuning than development and didn’t serve to be a test of my skills.

So I chose to venture into other areas of Silverlight and with very little exception, I found that WPF skills do scale down to SL quite well.

I know some Silverlight people might object to my terminology such as “downgrade” and “scale down” but let’s be realistic.  That’s what it is.  There is so much you can do in WPF and do it more easily than you can in Silverlight that detailing the differences would be far beyond the scope of this post or my blog (at least for now).  Remember that from the outset, Silverlight was intended to be Windows Presentation Framework, Everywhere.  And to a large degree, that’s what it is.

The bottom line for me is that I can do both with equal aplomb.  There are nuances to each, but even those are becoming less obvious.  For instance, Silverlight uses “states” where WPF does not.  Or does it?

WPF version 4 is now in Beta 2.  One of the many things that have been added in WPF version 4 is the official inclusion of the Visual State Manager.  I say “official” because it’s been available to developers of WPF for quite some time, but it’s an out-of-band download in the WPF Toolkit.

Convergence is the order of the day in what I like to call the XAML-space.  Many WPF developers felt slighted at PDC 09 because of the prominence of Silverlight 4 and the complete absence of WPF in both keynotes.  I even saw many people on Twitter saying that “WPF is dead” though I don’t agree.  The technologies are coming closer together and I find it ironic that what some people are saying is “dead” is actually closer to the WPF/Everywhere vision that was originally intended.

Having said that, I think that Silverlight is still a niche product and should be treated as such.  Unless you have cross-platform concerns (MS still owns over 90% of the desktops) or are going to need the expected future Silverlight on mobile, WPF is still the best choice for the desktop.

Remember, to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  Just because you know web application development doesn’t mean that every application should be a web application.

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