WPF and Silverlight and multi-targeting

There seems to be much more groundswell and interest in WPF and Silverlight in general which is a good thing. Something that I have been hearing and seeing is a lot of company chief technologists are thinking that in order to do Silverlight applications, it is something vastly different from WPF desktop or rich client apps.

The WPF in Silverlight is a subset of the full .NET 3.5 Framework WPF library. The design patterns and architectural patterns are either identical or very slightly varied.

Yes, because Silverlight is run in a browser plugin there are security constraints and there are some complications of getting and putting data in a line of business type of application but certainly not insurmountable.

I guess because the XAML language is a new paradigm of how to think about designing an architecture and has a steep learning curve, many companies that want to get up to speed with it are looking for more experienced resources in just Silverlight. The thing is, theres not a lot of full web based line of business apps being done completely in Silverlight.

With the Prism Framework and Composite Application Guidance Library, its possible to have a common code base for targeting both WPF desktop and Silverlight web. The underlying main core business logic layer is common to both and is architected in such a way that the main view XAML is designed with Silverlight in mind and keeping track of the limits of the WPF subset in Silverlight.

Contact me at info@kistner.net to get more info on how we can contract with your organization to provide some WPF/Silverlight/Prism consulting services to get you up to speed.