WPF - XBap vs Standalone Windows App

Question

I'm thinking through a potential WPF application and have gained a reasonable understanding of what XBAPs, how they are deployed, limited trust and so on.

The application I am considering probably wiill require fuller trust than an XBAP allows by default and also use of WCF with WS bindings etc.

Hence I'm leaning towards the stand alone windows application stream of WPF at the moment.

However I need to get a handle on any disadvantages/advantages of going down this route as oppossed to using XBAPs. I thought I had read updating applications was more problamatic but can't find a definitive statement on this.

Answer 1

ClickOnce is the default standard for deploying standalone WPF applications if you will be publishing updates frequently. I wouldn't say it's extremely difficult, but it's more involved than an XBAP.

XBAP deployment is like deploying a webpage; build, copy files to the server and you're done. ClickOnce apps require you to create a deployment (two xml files and your assemblies), and the way client and server files are kept in sync is more complicated (though ClickOnce hides all of that).

The main hurdle I faced with ClickOnce was creating deployments. Visual Studio works fine for simple scenarios but doesn't cut it for complicated stuff; for example, creating different versions of your app (dev, qa, prod) that can be deployed from different servers and installed together on the same machine. Not rocket science, but more complicated than XBAPs.

This Microsoft documentation may help you.