Silverlight vs webbrowser application (.xbab) ?

Question

I want to write a web version of an image processing application writen using winforms before. Which is prefered silverlight or xbab application? what is main differences of them?

Answer 1

• Silverlight applications will work on Mac and eventually on Linux.
• Your users won't need to install full .NET framework runtime, instead they will need only smaller Silverlight plugin.
• Silverlight is subset of WPF, so many features from WPF are simply not available for Silverlight.
• Microsoft seems to be more dedicated to Silverlight.

So I would definitely do it in Silverlight. The only good thing about WPF is that it has more features and is more mature.

Your other options are JavaFX, Flash/Flex and Canvas tag in HTML5

Answer 2

I think Silverlight will eventually fade XBAP out, as said before it doesn't need the whole .net framework on client's box, and also works accross platform & browsers, recently it also introduced more languages like Iron Ruby & Iron Python, also it has better support for video streaming