Okay, so we haven't been able to release a new revolUXions episode in a while (both Andy and I are up to our armpits in XAML, but we'll be back soon), but we haven't forgotten WPF. What's funny is that many people are. Now I'm the last person to criticize Microsoft - that's why if I am critisizing Microsoft you know it has be bad (at least in my eyes). I think Microsoft is playing up Silverlight a bit too much.
Now we can spend eternity sitting here and discussing the market impact of WPF vs Silverlight, or Flash vs. Silverlight, or whatever. But my point is that the marketing is maybe a bit confusing. In fact, I must've heard at least a dozen confused queries in the past two days. I've had clients coming to me for "WPF and .NET 3.0 websites". People are finding it hard to differentiate between WPF and Silverlight. Especially with 1.1 Alpha out now.
Look, I'm really happy with Silverlight. I'll be even more when I get to go deep inside Silverlight. But let's not forget WPF. That's the root technology. A whole lot more (profit and innovation) will come out of WPF than WPF/E (that's what Silverlight used to be called and what potentially confused people - and don't get me started about people confused with 3.0 and 3.5). There's a lot of time, money, knowledge, and infrastructure invested in the Windows platform (software, i.e.) and WPF is the successor to Windows Forms - the biggest UI change since DOS to Windows. You do the math.
Andy and I just had this discussion about Silverlight. His company is really deep into Silverlight and he's just worshipping it like a madman. I'm still iffy about Silverlight. But he and I both agreed on one thing: keep the web and desktop seperate to a point. Now, innovation is not bad - not at all. But it's kinda like those washing machines you can control from the office. Technologically that's awesome, but the actual usability requires a *bit* more thinking.
Nukeation will be doing some Silverlight stuff no doubt, but we're focusing almost 98% on WPF only. In fact, check out our new services at www.nukeation.com - and we'll be creating WPF support tools starting with NukeBall which is being ported to WPF (as well as being compatible with VS2005/WinForms) and Codename Helios.
But back to my original point: I think WPF is being forgotten over Silverlight which is just a fraction of the whole innovation. What do you think?