One of the nice additions to Silverlight 3 is the 'out-of-browser' capabilities:

The new out of browser experience in Silverlight 3 enables users to place their favorite Silverlight applications directly onto their PC and Mac, with links on the desktop and start menu—all without the need to download an additional runtime or browser plug-in. Further, the new experience enables Silverlight applications to work whether the computer is connected to the Internet or not—a radical improvement to the traditional Web experience.

Would this eliminate the raison-d'être of the WPF XBAP deployment model? Typically this would be used when you needed a particular functionality that was unavailable in Silverlight but required a sandboxed environment for your application to run in. Now, with the feature set of Silverlight is creeping towards that of WPF and the possibility to run Silverlight out-of-browser, it would seem that XBAP has no role to play anymore.

The functionality offered by Silverlight 3 would simplify the entire distribution and deployment model; simply add a shortcut and the user is always served the latest version of the application.

The only scenario I can think of is running a true 3D application in a browser; obviously it won't take long for someone to create a 3D engine using the SL3 3D projection planes, but true 3D still is beyond the capabilities of Silverlight. Then again, how many people are actually doing this in WPF in the first place?

So, let me know what you think; do XBAPs still have a future?

Charles Petzold has an interesting blogpost on creating the fisheye effect on a row of buttons -similar to that of the OS X dock- both in WPF and in Silverlight. The WPF version was allready explained by him in his Applications = Code + Markup book, which I'm currently re-reading with a vengeance. The Silverlight version can't be completely done in markup.



Petzold is very thorough, which I've come to expect of him and meticulously writes down every improvement he makes to his code and markup. Awesome post.

Evi Steins was born on 7.May 2009. She weighed in at 3450 grams which is about half a stone if your using some crazy non-metric system :)





She's in good health and keeps us awake all through the night, but we feel blessed nevertheless. She was born almost two weeks past her due date.

So, this adorable little girl will be keeping me off WPF for some time more, I guess.

The next couple of weeks I'm not going to post anything on this blog. My girlfriend and me are in the process of expanding our family and in the next two weeks I expect our firstborn to arrive. This means I don't have a lot of spare time to do WPF, Silverlight or anything else .NET related (except in my job of course).

So, I hope to see you all back in about a month or two. I promise I will keep you posted about the baby once in a while :)

Cheers,
Ruben

When I was looking at this article and the Scrollable Friction Canvas For Silverlight, a joint venture by Sasha Berber and Jeremiah Morrill I came across another post on the Jeremiahs blog in which he showed off his CustomBehavior for WPF.

This glass effect looks amazing!