PC27: Microsoft Silverlight, WPF and the Microsoft .NET Framework: Sharing Skills and Code

I attended this session as I'm working in both platforms right now, and expected to learn something.

It was disappointing. There main two things mentioned as 'differences', what that in Silverlight you need to go through some hoops to make cross-domain calls, and that are some differences in the networking stack. The other was that you did not have a Visual State Manager in WPF. I've learned this after the first day of working with Silverlight so it did not help much.

The rest of the presentation was showing things that worked well in both platforms.

If you spent some time working with both platforms you know that there are a lot of other differences that cause pain, so the presentation did not feel honest. In the Q&A section some people pointed to those issues, and the answers were that they are looking to increase the compatibility among both platforms.

The message was that if you need to run on both platforms, start with Silverlight and then move to WPF, which is also obvious once you start working with both platforms.

They mentioned there was an implementation of the Visual State Manager for WPF in CodePlex, which would be helpful, but I could not find it.