Windows Presentation Foundation has obvious benefits both for creating rich user experiences in Windows and for ease of development, but how do those advantages translate to the web? Most people would give the answer that WPF is just Flash for Windows. Just take the application in Windows and rewrite it in Flash. Now let’s say that we’ve invested a lot of time training you and me on how to write WPF applications, and a customer comes back and says they want the same quality of user experience in a web app. We’d say that a different team of people would need to come up to speed on Flash and build it out in Flash. This would effectively duplicate our efforts. Do you think they will pay us double? They probably would not. What would be great is if there was some way to leverage our expertise in WPF for the web. This is where Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E) fits into the picture.
Microsoft today announced the availability of the development center for WPF/E on MSDN. It is currently only a Community Tech Preview, but by the end of 2007 there will finally be a viable competitor to Flash.
More information can be found here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/bb187358.aspx
