WPF Is Dead

Will Silverlight 5 replace WPF? Silverlight has been fast approaching the functionality of WPF for sometime now.  Out-Of-Browser support, arguably the richest 3D functionality in a browser, the fastest language to code line of business apps.

But Microsoft gave some pretty damming signals about Silverlight in the last 18 months.  But at MIX11 the tune seems to have changed...

http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/04/Silverlight-MIX

And this from Microsoft's Product Manager for Silverlight Scott Barnes:

“Right now there's a faction war inside Microsoft over HTML5 vs Silverlight. oh and WPF is dead.. i mean..it kind of was..but now.. funeral.”

"Right now WPF has no Microsoft Product Manager. The rise and fall of Microsoft UX Platform. My thoughts on how such an amazing potentially game changing thing, just failed due to internal politics etc."

"WPF however has more ubiquity than Silverlight today, it’s got approx. 70%+ ubiquity in Windows based machines and furthermore it’s gotten deeper traction when it comes to Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) so it presents quite a complex problem in around investment and it’s overall future.

On one hand, it’s pretty widely known within the company that WPF has been ear marked for death for quite some time and had it not had such prolific ubiquity or ISV’s that build software used by many on it (Autodesk 3DSMAX, Visual Studio, Expression etc) it would have been taken out back and shot long ago. It simply is too hard to kill, so the only way Microsoft to date knows how is to either spend majority of its focus on convincing developers that Silverlight is the better option and/or reduce the noise around WPF altogether hoping that others will pick up on the subtle tones that it’s better you don’t adopt but under the Smokey hazed veil of the a-typical response “It depends”.

WPF has no investment, it’s kept together by a skeleton crew and its evangelism / community efforts have little to no funding attached to it. It’s dead, the question now is how is the corpse going to be buried and no amount of cheer leading will change that outcome in the near future."

Check out the rest of Scott's damning article here.

So... Silverlight and HTML5 is the future of all development on the Windows platform then?

Rest in peace WPF, WinForms will be there to keep you company on the other side.