El Corazon wrote:

I need to find someone who carries the old movie "Looker" hmmmm....

That body scanning scene.... :) Actually that film is a good example of people getting predictions hillariously wrong. In the film they digitise actors (and then murder them) and use their digital proxies to make adverts - BUT they composite the people on real footage of empty film sets. Everyone knows that it's much easier to computer render the set than the people so why are they filming empty sets with motion control cameras? I guess the director thought people just sitting infront of banks of computers would make for a boring conclusion to the film :)

Firstly WPF isn't a web technology. You can write a WPF that downloads from the web and runs in partial trust, and you can make it use web services for back-end functionality, but that makes it no different from Windows Forms and nobody says that's a web technology. Secondly, piracy would be the worst reason ever to develop web apps. Software vendors tub-thump all the time about piracy losing them millions because they want to convince as many people as possible to buy, but lets me clear: they are not actually losing anything really. Assume piracy was impossible - I can think of lots of alternatives to the most-pirated apps (MS Office, Photoshop, etc) that I would explore before forking over the cash that Microsoft and Adobe charge. The reasons to develop for the web instead of the desktop is that you get instant feedback; you can update the app without everyone having to download a new version (or even a patch); you can fund the app with advertising (not because people hate it any less than they would if it was in desktop apps, but they are used to it by now); and the #1 reason: you might get bought by Google/Yahoo/Microsoft.

I don't think many developers will touch it until Microsoft releases the graphical designer tools in a useable state. XAML is an exceptionally verbose way to specify a user interface - I don't see many people wanting to write it by hand, not for a serious application anyway. I also have concerns over the amount of code necessary to manipulate the WPF object model programmatically compared to Windows Forms apps. Add to that the fact that developers have already learned a heap of new stuff for C#/VB.NET, Windows Forms/ASP.NET, I think there's a general feeling of "oh no, not another new technology" from Windows developers. Developers don't mind learning new stuff if there is a big benefit but I don't think people are seeing what the benefit is at the present time.

norm .net wrote:

Solution drink Diet Coke!

Yup, that tastes bad *everywhere*