Programming WPF, 2nd Edition

Silverlight and WPF

In .NET 3.0, XAML is used as an object graph serialization technology. For WPF, this allows XAML to be used as a user interface markup language that is then serialized into CLR objects. But it is important to note that WPF does not require XAML at all. You can create user interface objects by writing CLR code like so:

Canvas myCanvas = new Canvas(  ); // You can't do this in Silverlight 1.0

Silverlight 1.0 is different in this respect, as it requires XAML. There is no way to create XAML objects from code without using XAML. Silverlight is about showing elements described with XAML on a web page. There are other differences between the two technologies, as detailed in Table E-2.

Table E-2. Silverlight and WPF

Silverlight	Windows Presentation Foundation
Web-based	Desktop applications, click-once deployment, or XBAP applications
Works across different operating systems (Windows and Mac OS X in the first release)	Requires Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, or Windows Vista
Supports multiple web browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows; Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X)	Internet Explorer 6+ for XBAP applications
No .NET Framework requirements	Requires .NET 3.0 Framework
No Windows Media Player required for media support	Requires Windows Media Player 10 for media support
Uses XAML for design markup, but the library of tags is smaller	Uses XAML for design markup, but supports a large library of tags
Supports JavaScript or managed languages (C#, Visual Basic, etc.) for Silverlight ...