MIX06: Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere ("WPF/E")
WPF/E is a subset of WPF focused on interactive content that works cross platform. WPF/E can be hosted in multiple browsers and on multiple operating systems. That's right, including operating systems other than Windows. WPF/E, like WPF, uses XAML. Unlike WPF, you have two options for writing the concept of "code behind" the XAML markup. You can write it in C# or VB.Net. Your code then compiles to intermediate language which the WPF/E client runtime executes. The initial delivery mechanism for the runtime is a browser add-in. The browser add-in has an execution environment for the intermediate language. The goal is to keep the size of the add-in under 2 megabytes. The other code option is to use JavaScript. The browser’s JavaScript engine is used to access the objects created from XAML through the HTML DOM. The WPF/E session at MIX06 demonstrated the same samples running in both IE and Firefox on Windows as well as Safari on a Mac. WPF/E shares the same tools as WPF. Designers can build WPF/E UIs with Expression Interactive Designer and developers can use Visual Studio. You get all the unified designer/developer process associated with WPF applications. The difference is that with WPF/E you’ll target a subset of the functionality you can build with WPF. This parallels the current experience building Windows Forms interfaces on the Compact Framework vs. the full .NET Framework.
-Marc & David