I’ve been wanting to post something about the differences between WPF and Silverlight’s handling of Resources, but this was just posted at LearnWPF. A nice summary worthy of a quick read if you’re not already familiar with the differences.
It’s too bad that there isn’t better feature/behavior parity between WPF and Silverlight 2.0 — if for no other reason than making it easier to learn both platforms. The things that make WPF powerful are often absent, so you need to create your own techniques. If you’re trying to share UI or code — that means a watered-down version of your code is being used in WPF. So much is missing right now, only the code-behind might be portable. Even that may require some refactoring.
I find this chain on the Silverlight forums interesting — at least to see what others find important.
Silverlight 3.0 will hopefully be the sweet spot for most developers. 2.0 — it’s a great start, especially if you’re starting from scratch — but requires some rethinking if you know WPF.
Is there anything you would have left out of Silverlight 2.0 to get your "favorite" feature added?
My #1: I would have ditched any support for dynamic languages. Learning a new language isn’t that hard — and it’s clear that learning Javascript hasn’t prevented millions of developers/hackers/hobbyists from creating interactive web pages.