Getting Started with Silverlight

Comparing 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. With WPF, you can create user interface objects as CLR code like so:

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

Silverlight is different in this respect because it requires XAML. There is no way to create Silverlight XAML objects without utilizing XAML. Silverlight is about displaying elements that are described in XAML on a web page. There are other differences between the two technologies detailed in Table -1.

Table 1. Silverlight and WPF differ from each other in a number of important ways

Silverlight	Windows Presentation Foundation
Web-based	Desktop applications, click-once deployment or XBAP applications
Works across different operating systems (Windows and Mac OSX in the first release)	Requires Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Window Vista
Supports multiple web browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows, Firefox and Safari on Mac OSX)	Internet Explorer 6+ for XBAP applications
No .NET Runtime requirements	Requires .NET 3.0 Runtime
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 ...