I just finished reading an
interesting post from Dax Pandhi's weblog comparing WPF and flash. Dax's company
Nukeation Studios have designed a number of popular .NET sites including the
franklins.net and
dotnetrocks (and pretty much everything else public facing) for Carl Franklin,
hanselminutes etc. I've always been curious about how WPF stacked up compared to flash, since I've never programmed in it. The big selling point that I knew of was WPF is hardware-accelerated. The big selling point for flash looked like the ability to run on different platforms, and a large base of users with the flash player already installed. With
WPF/E looking less and less like vapourware every day that cross-plaform advantage seems to be eroded somewhat (although WPF/E has not been publicly released yet, so naturally time will tell). It was interesting to see Dax list off a few other differences in the platform - his list makes flash sound more like an platform for displaying animations that grew into a full-blown UI framework, whereas WPF has been designed from the ground up with a lot more usage scenarios in mind. Hopefully tools like EID can get the “creative” people on-board, as the platform will probably live or die based on the quality of applications that are built for it.