Wednesday, September 3, 2008 12:37 PM
Desklighter is a new offering from blendables which lets you create stand-alone Silverlight applications that don’t require a browser to run…very much like how you can have stand alone Flash exe’s executable from your desktop.
It’s a neat idea, although they raise a good question in their own FAQ:
We have WPF, so why would we want to make Silverlight (intended to be a web technology) work from a desktop?
Their response was a little confusing:
WPF requires that you need to have the .NET Framework 3.0 or higher installed on the client machine. Desklights (the executables created using Desklighter) require only the lightweight Silverlight plug-in along with the .NET Framework 2.0.
Am I missing something here? Both Desklights and WPF require *some* version of the .NET framework to be installed. Is the thought that more people will have .NET 2.0 installed by default than 3.0 or higher? Also, the plug-in is required…what if people don’t have it? Is there much of a leap between requiring users install the plugin and .NET 2.0 than installing .NET 3.0 for a WPF app?
I’m not trying to be difficult with this, as I think its a very kewl concept…just trying to understand the logic to argue WPF vs. Desklight.
D