Programming C# 4.0, 6th Edition

Chapter 20. WPF and Silverlight

WPF and Silverlight are related technologies for building user interfaces in .NET. Although they are aimed at two significantly different scenarios, they share so many concepts and features that it makes sense to discuss both of them at the same time—almost everything in this chapter applies to both WPF and Silverlight.

As its name suggests, the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is for building interactive applications that run on Windows. WPF applications typically run as standalone applications, requiring an installation step to get them onto the target machine, as they may need prerequisites to be installed first. (WPF is .NET-based, so it requires the .NET Framework to be installed.) This means they are deployed like old-school Windows desktop applications. However, WPF makes it easy for applications to exploit the graphical potential of modern computers in a way that is extremely hard to achieve with more traditional Windows UI technologies. WPF applications don’t have to look old-school.

Silverlight is for web applications, or more specifically, so-called Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). It does not depend on the full .NET Framework—it is a browser plug-in that provides a self-contained, lightweight, cross-platform version of the framework. The whole Silverlight runtime is around a 5 MB download, whereas the full .NET Framework is far more than 200 MB^[53]—and Silverlight installs in seconds rather than minutes. Once the plug-in is installed, ...