WPF/E - December CTP drop

Finally, the much awaited "Flash Killer!?" from Microsoft is available for download in CTP (Community Tech Preview) form.

WPF/E is basically a Microsoft run everywhere on everything technology capable of rendering a subset of WPF XAML with some simple initial design goals :

• Enhance various browsers on Windows and on the Macintosh.
• Be able to render XAML.
• Be able to render media (music and video).
• Enable programming that is consistent with the Web programming model.
• Be small.

The Windows CTP is available here and the Mac version available here. See Johan Rayner's blog for more WPF/E content and links. It's only about 1.1mb in size and browsing to the samples directly should also trigger a download.

The first I did after installing WPF/E was to go and hunt for decent samples to try out in Firefox. (After upgrading to Vista I need to find excuses to open up Firefox every now and again :p)  I found some samples on Channel9 that showcases some of the WPF/e features. You can find the samples here on the WPF/e playground. There's more samples, downloadable and online, available from Johan's blog.

A high-level overview of the WPF/E architecture and it's design goals are available from here. WPF/E contains a small portable cross-platform version of the CLR and .NET Framework and from the documentation it seems that future releases will enable a managed code programming model that will allow for client-side development to be done in your .NET language of choice.

On a related note, Microsoft's "the Panel" site hosts a couple of WPF sample applications (with source code) suitable for using with the full desktop version of WPF. One of the featured applications is a RSS Reader, UniverRSS, showing off 3d animation, databinding and integration with the RSS Feed store. Pretty nifty stuff.

[Link via Andrew Stopford's blog]