Chapter 17. WPF and browsers: XBAP, ClickOnce, and Silverlight
This chapter covers:
- XBAPs
- ClickOnce
- Silverlight
- Our whining about security and why other technologies have cooler names
Although WPF is mainly about building Windows applications, there are many ways in which WPF can be used with browsers. WPF certainly isn’t going to replace ASP.NET any time soon, but there are several scenarios where you might want to use WPF when building applications that will be accessed via a browser. Three different technologies in WPF/.NET 3.x provide different mechanisms for accessing WPF applications over the web—XBAP, ClickOnce, Silverlight. We’re going to provide a brief summary of each technology here, and then go into more detail throughout the chapter, using the dictionary application as an example.
XBAP, short for XAML Browser APplication, allows WPF applications to be run directly from within your browser. This is sort of like using ActiveX controls; you can have arbitrary code be downloaded and executed on the client machine inside the browser. The key difference is that, unlike ActiveX, .NET has a robust security model, so it’s possible to control what an XBAP is allowed to do. The ActiveX security model had two modes—don’t allow or (as one of our colleagues describes it) party on your hard drive.