Silverfish / WPF/E straight-up question
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Right, so i know there are a few WPF gurus here, and suspect there must be at least someone who really gets this whole WPF/E (i know it's not called Silverfish, but that's all i can think of right now and i think it's close) thing. What, really, does it get me? I'm talkin' in terms of pure unhindered capabilities: communication and performance. Don't care about the pretty stuff, 'cause as much as i like a good screen display that's not why i write web-apps. What does this bring to the table in terms of raw speed? Or are there capabilities in place for fast, secure non-HTTP connections? Or... heck, anything else that i should be interested in? I'm so sick of reading blog posts touting the same fluffy demos... just tell me, please, is there any meat on these bones?
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It appears that everybody is under the impression that I approve of the documentation. You probably also blame Ken Burns for supporting slavery.
--Raymond Chen on MSDN
Shog9 wrote:
I'm talkin' in terms of pure unhindered capabilities: communication and performance.
Performance: I suspect very little. Communication: Not sure, but if it's ease of programming you're after there probably is a real bonus, probably removing all the low level crap that you have to deal with for socket/network/web programming.
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Right, so i know there are a few WPF gurus here, and suspect there must be at least someone who really gets this whole WPF/E (i know it's not called Silverfish, but that's all i can think of right now and i think it's close) thing. What, really, does it get me? I'm talkin' in terms of pure unhindered capabilities: communication and performance. Don't care about the pretty stuff, 'cause as much as i like a good screen display that's not why i write web-apps. What does this bring to the table in terms of raw speed? Or are there capabilities in place for fast, secure non-HTTP connections? Or... heck, anything else that i should be interested in? I'm so sick of reading blog posts touting the same fluffy demos... just tell me, please, is there any meat on these bones?
----
It appears that everybody is under the impression that I approve of the documentation. You probably also blame Ken Burns for supporting slavery.
--Raymond Chen on MSDN
Shog9 wrote:
i know it's not called Silverfish, but that's all i can think of right now and i think it's close
Silverlight[^] Silverlight on Channel 9 [^]
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Right, so i know there are a few WPF gurus here, and suspect there must be at least someone who really gets this whole WPF/E (i know it's not called Silverfish, but that's all i can think of right now and i think it's close) thing. What, really, does it get me? I'm talkin' in terms of pure unhindered capabilities: communication and performance. Don't care about the pretty stuff, 'cause as much as i like a good screen display that's not why i write web-apps. What does this bring to the table in terms of raw speed? Or are there capabilities in place for fast, secure non-HTTP connections? Or... heck, anything else that i should be interested in? I'm so sick of reading blog posts touting the same fluffy demos... just tell me, please, is there any meat on these bones?
----
It appears that everybody is under the impression that I approve of the documentation. You probably also blame Ken Burns for supporting slavery.
--Raymond Chen on MSDN
WPF/E (And WPF) has excellent databinding capabilities, far better then Flash. Also the layout is really separated from the code. (ok, you can hack code using special tags, but this isn't really a good thing to do). WPF/E uses the .NET framework as a base, so you guessed it, you get all the goodness that comes with the framework. Out-of-the-box webservices and database support and you can use the large amount of third-party libraries out here on the codeproject and other sites. I think WPF in general is a really good step forward for microsoft. After having followed a course in WPF I quickly discovered that it's way simpler to build a UI using WPF.
WM. What about weapons of mass-construction? "What? Its an Apple MacBook Pro. They are sexy!" - Paul Watson
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WPF/E (And WPF) has excellent databinding capabilities, far better then Flash. Also the layout is really separated from the code. (ok, you can hack code using special tags, but this isn't really a good thing to do). WPF/E uses the .NET framework as a base, so you guessed it, you get all the goodness that comes with the framework. Out-of-the-box webservices and database support and you can use the large amount of third-party libraries out here on the codeproject and other sites. I think WPF in general is a really good step forward for microsoft. After having followed a course in WPF I quickly discovered that it's way simpler to build a UI using WPF.
WM. What about weapons of mass-construction? "What? Its an Apple MacBook Pro. They are sexy!" - Paul Watson
Yes but how much of WPF is in WPF/e? The charts I was shown at Mix'06 showed a lot of stuff missing.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote:
And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
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Right, so i know there are a few WPF gurus here, and suspect there must be at least someone who really gets this whole WPF/E (i know it's not called Silverfish, but that's all i can think of right now and i think it's close) thing. What, really, does it get me? I'm talkin' in terms of pure unhindered capabilities: communication and performance. Don't care about the pretty stuff, 'cause as much as i like a good screen display that's not why i write web-apps. What does this bring to the table in terms of raw speed? Or are there capabilities in place for fast, secure non-HTTP connections? Or... heck, anything else that i should be interested in? I'm so sick of reading blog posts touting the same fluffy demos... just tell me, please, is there any meat on these bones?
----
It appears that everybody is under the impression that I approve of the documentation. You probably also blame Ken Burns for supporting slavery.
--Raymond Chen on MSDN
I'm currently working on a quite demanding web application (it's a game, but I'm not going to talk specifics) and one of the aspects of this was the requirement to draw filled polygons in the web browser (up to about 300 at a time, not animated). I wrote a JavaScript graphics library which acted as a layer between VML (for IE) and SVG (for Firefox), basically abstracting the 'canvas' model both vector drawing methods support. This was all well and good, but performance was an issue. As I've been a .NET programmer for three years, over my time I've dabbled with .NET 3.0 and XAML, and was surprised to see Microsoft releasing a web browser component that provides cross-browser XAML support; obviously to be in direct competition with Abobe. So, after some fiddling around for a couple of weeks with the WPF/E SDK and being wowed by the CTP demos, I managed to emulate the polygon drawing methods I did in JavaScript. Unfortunately, the performance issues were still there. I wasn't impressed. But, the bottleneck was not WPF/E itself... because these polygons were being dynamically added to the canvas (using CreateFromXaml() in JavaScript) a bit of profiling with lots of 'new Date().valueOf()' shows that this was actually where the performance problems lay. I came to the conclusion that it was the WPF/E <-> JavaScript layer that was causing the delays. Using static XAML as a test made these performance rendering problems disappear... but that wasn't what the application was all about, sadly. So, if you're using WPF/E with say Web Expression (or static XAML), creating animations, cartoons, videos, and basic (really basic) applications in vectors, WPF/E is actually rather good. But trying to be more dynamic and introducing complicated JavaScript into the mix doesn't appear to be doing any favours. Next up Microsoft... give IE a multi-threaded JavaScript engine and hopefully other browsers will follow suit. (This was a bit longer than I planned.. :))
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Right, so i know there are a few WPF gurus here, and suspect there must be at least someone who really gets this whole WPF/E (i know it's not called Silverfish, but that's all i can think of right now and i think it's close) thing. What, really, does it get me? I'm talkin' in terms of pure unhindered capabilities: communication and performance. Don't care about the pretty stuff, 'cause as much as i like a good screen display that's not why i write web-apps. What does this bring to the table in terms of raw speed? Or are there capabilities in place for fast, secure non-HTTP connections? Or... heck, anything else that i should be interested in? I'm so sick of reading blog posts touting the same fluffy demos... just tell me, please, is there any meat on these bones?
----
It appears that everybody is under the impression that I approve of the documentation. You probably also blame Ken Burns for supporting slavery.
--Raymond Chen on MSDN
I hate Silverfish. A little ammonia usually scares them away :)
"Quality Software since 1983!"
http://www.smoothjazzy.com/ - see the "Programming" section for freeware tools and articles. -
Right, so i know there are a few WPF gurus here, and suspect there must be at least someone who really gets this whole WPF/E (i know it's not called Silverfish, but that's all i can think of right now and i think it's close) thing. What, really, does it get me? I'm talkin' in terms of pure unhindered capabilities: communication and performance. Don't care about the pretty stuff, 'cause as much as i like a good screen display that's not why i write web-apps. What does this bring to the table in terms of raw speed? Or are there capabilities in place for fast, secure non-HTTP connections? Or... heck, anything else that i should be interested in? I'm so sick of reading blog posts touting the same fluffy demos... just tell me, please, is there any meat on these bones?
----
It appears that everybody is under the impression that I approve of the documentation. You probably also blame Ken Burns for supporting slavery.
--Raymond Chen on MSDN
This[^] should answer some questions you might have about Silverlight.
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Enjoy! Vote! Learn! Love! Save the whales! Eat raw diamonds! Do the Foxtrot in your tighty-whiteys! Start fires! Kill Martians!
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This[^] should answer some questions you might have about Silverlight.
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Enjoy! Vote! Learn! Love! Save the whales! Eat raw diamonds! Do the Foxtrot in your tighty-whiteys! Start fires! Kill Martians!
So...
Dramatically improved performance for AJAX-enabled Web sites with the power, performance, and flexibility of Silverlight and .NET-connected software.
...is that a "yes"? If i have, say, 5000 items in a list, where as the user scrolls i must determine the relative position to the screen of each item and trigger loading auxiliary data as items approach the screen. Current problems: relatively heavy HTTP connections, poor control over lifetime of said connections, slow DOM manipulation. Are these areas where the dramatic performance improvements come in to play? Close?
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It appears that everybody is under the impression that I approve of the documentation. You probably also blame Ken Burns for supporting slavery.
--Raymond Chen on MSDN
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So...
Dramatically improved performance for AJAX-enabled Web sites with the power, performance, and flexibility of Silverlight and .NET-connected software.
...is that a "yes"? If i have, say, 5000 items in a list, where as the user scrolls i must determine the relative position to the screen of each item and trigger loading auxiliary data as items approach the screen. Current problems: relatively heavy HTTP connections, poor control over lifetime of said connections, slow DOM manipulation. Are these areas where the dramatic performance improvements come in to play? Close?
----
It appears that everybody is under the impression that I approve of the documentation. You probably also blame Ken Burns for supporting slavery.
--Raymond Chen on MSDN
I dunno. I don't know much about Silverlight. It's very, very different from WPF. In fact, it is almost nothing like WPF. The funny thing is, the email I got when you replied to my post read:
So... Dramatic...
I thought that you must have taken a sip from the "special" Kool-aid! :~
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Enjoy! Vote! Learn! Love! Save the whales! Eat raw diamonds! Do the Foxtrot in your tighty-whiteys! Start fires! Kill Martians!
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I dunno. I don't know much about Silverlight. It's very, very different from WPF. In fact, it is almost nothing like WPF. The funny thing is, the email I got when you replied to my post read:
So... Dramatic...
I thought that you must have taken a sip from the "special" Kool-aid! :~
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Enjoy! Vote! Learn! Love! Save the whales! Eat raw diamonds! Do the Foxtrot in your tighty-whiteys! Start fires! Kill Martians!
Josh Smith wrote:
I thought that you must have taken a sip from the "special" Kool-aid!
:laugh: No, not yet. My primary motivation for this thread is that i hate to ignore something useful, but any new dependency increases the deployment headaches significantly... and since fast'n'easy deployment is one of my primary reasons for writing web-apps, there'd have to be a lot of benefit to make me give that up.
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It appears that everybody is under the impression that I approve of the documentation. You probably also blame Ken Burns for supporting slavery.
--Raymond Chen on MSDN