WPF vs Silverlight OOB with WCF RIA Services

Question

I know there are other issues involved in any decission when beginning a large project, but my experience in the past has been with SL web based apps (w/ entity framework) where I have found wcf ria services such a time saver, I am wondering what people think about the reasons one might remain with wpf for desktop apps where so much more effort must be expended to match what the ria services provide in SL. This project is definitely a data-centric business app.

Any and all oversvations and experiences would be most welcome.

Thanks, Steve

Answer 1

I may have some insight on your situation, since I am faced with making the same decision right now. I wrote up a blog post about my experience here:

http://samuelmueller.com/2010/11/wpf-4-vs-silverlight-4-which-do-you-choose

To summarize, WPF has one very big advantage over silverlight, especially with data-centric apps:

Performance.

With that being said, the list of negatives is quite daunting, and really makes WPF a hard sell over Silverlight:

• No support for WCF RIA Services, even with SP1
• Sub-par validation support, with INofityDataErrorInfo missing
• The WPF toolkit has been practically abandoned, whilst Silverlight toolkit and theming are very much active.
• No Fluid UI

If you can live with the performance, it seems like Silverlight is the more productive and compelling choice, at least until MS makes some effort into leveling the two platforms.

Answer 2

The thing is, Microsoft seemed to have developped WPF at the beginning, but failed to really keep it fresh. On the other hand, they are working on improving Silverlight, releasing new version almost every years.

I still like WPF over typical windows forms and find that not having RIA services isn't much of a problem since you can still access databases the way I am used in normal Windows Form.