Microsoft goes cross-platform.(Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere, developer tool)

Byline: Tim Anderson

Microsoft goes cross-platform

We explore Microsoft's cross-platform runtime for Windows Presentation Foundation

Microsoft has released the first preview of Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E), a Flash-like browser plug-in that lets you play multimedia and render XAML, an XML language for defining graphics and a user interface. Currently you can code against it with Javascript, though Microsoft is promising a small .Net runtime in the final release, which will let you code in C# or VB.Net, provided you stick to a small, as yet unspecified subset of the .Net Framework.

Cross-platform in this context means Windows and Mac, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, although this might be extended to mobile devices and to Linux at a future date.

Although it uses the Windows Presentation Foundation name, WPF/E is a much-reduced subset of its desktop cousin, with only a limited range of objects available. That said, even in the preview it has a capable runtime for graphics and multimedia, and includes its own video player for files in .wmv format (Windows Media Video). Although the .Net runtime is absent in this version, you can still write code in Javascript and interact with the WPF/E control from HTML.

Why not use Flash? Flash has many advantages, including maturity, ubiquity and high efficiency. Another option is SVG, the W3C standard for vector graphics in web pages, although there are more browsers with the Flash runtime than have SVG viewers. Adobe has a free SVG viewer, but has frozen its development following its acquisition of Macromedia.