#18 – Silverlight and WPF Differences

Silverlight’s original name was WPF/E (WPF/Everywhere), underscoring the fact that Silverlight follows the same programming model as WPF and uses many of the same controls, but is based on a client library that is downloaded from the browser and targeted to run on a wider variety of platforms.

Core differences between WPF and Silverlight:

• WPF runs only on Windows platforms
• WPF expects .NET Framework to already be present on client
• Silverlight can use a subset of all WPF controls
• Silverlight uses a subset of the full .NET Framework and the CLR

Features present in WPF but not in Silverlight:

• Flow document support
• Dynamic resources
• Merged dictionaries
• Resetting a style to a new FrameworkElement
• Style inheritance
• Implicit styles with TargetType attribute
• Triggers for Styles, ControlTemplates, DataTemplates.
• Larger number of data binding features
• Routed commands
• Declaratively associate controls and commands
• Inherit from UIElement
• Custom markup extensions
• Runtime-accessible visual and logical trees
• Controls: AccessText, BulletChrome, ButtonChrome, ContextMenu, Decorator, DocumentPageView, DocumentViewer, GridViewColumnHeader, GridViewRowPresenter, GroupBox, GroupItem, InkCanvas, Menu, MenuItem, PageContent, Ribbon, Separator, StatusBar, TickBar, ToolBar, Track, UniformGrid,

Features present in Silverlight but not in WPF:

• Deep Zoom
• Controls: AutoCompleteBox, DataPager, DescriptionViewer, HyperlinkButton, MultiScaleImage, NumericUpDown, ValidationSummary