Part 4. The last mile

In the telecommunication industry, they often refer to the last mile problem —it doesn’t matter that there’s shiny fiber-optic cable run everywhere in the country if the connection between the fiber and your house is a piece of string with a pair of tennis shoes hanging from it.

In development, the distance between getting a basically working application and a finished, shippable application is similar (although perhaps not quite so extreme).

In this section, we’ll cover some of the topics that, although not required to get an application working, help finish the application or make it available in a different way. We’ll start by talking about an alternative type of application that WPF supports in chapter 16, “Building a navigation application.” Navigation applications are kind of like browser apps, with back and forward navigation, but they can be standalone. As you’ll see in chapter 17—“WPF and browsers: XBAP, ClickOnce, and Silverlight”—navigation applications (and other WPF applications) can be run directly within a browser, or they can be deployed over the web via ClickOnce.