Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Summary

In this chapter, we covered many options for enabling rich internet applications (RIA). These included creating standard web pages that leverage Ajax, building rich UIs inside a web browser running on a Windows Client using XBAP, and building cross-platform, media-rich solutions based on the Silverlight browser plug-in.

Which technology you use in your next application is really dependent on your content and your audience. The broadest possible user reach in order of most to fewest is ASP.NET and Ajax, then Silverlight, and finally XBAP. However, the highest degree of user interaction is the opposite order: XBAP, Silverlight (which is quickly catching up to XBAP and WPF), and then Ajax. You should carefully consider the technology you ...