Hi there,
I want to build a WPF web application that could installed on a user's computer. So any hosting requirements would be subject to whatever configuration the user has. What are there requirements to host a WPF application?
You will want to look into Windows Communication Foundation. It can take any .NET application and host a web services (via a variety of bindings) in it.
Any OS that can host WCF (.NET Framework 3 and beyond) should be adequate. Obviously, exposing web services on client machines will have security implications/constraints.
WPF is a client-side technology - not really a "hosting" technology. Typically, you'd use Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for a service provider.
For either of the two above technologies, the system will require the appropriate .NET framework to be installed. (If you target .NET 3.5, it will require .NET 3.5, etc.) WPF requires Windows for the OS, as it isn't supported by the Mono project. WCF is partially supported via Mono on other platforms, however.
Are you talk about WPF or WCF ??
Windows Presentation Foundation is the "Windows Forms" in xaml code, the Windows Comunication Foundation is the next step from the ASMX and WSE Web Services.
The way you write, seams that you are talking about WCF and not WPF.
WPF is a windows application, and can run in any Windows Computer that has .NET Framework 3.0+ installed
WCF is a service application and I would give you a better answer pointing to my answer in the question:
I hope it's what you want.
This is the same question as a little while before, replacing Silveright with WPF. Basically the same answer is true but there's a bit less built in to make it easier for you; you still need to make requests to a server which the client has nothing to do with. You also have the full power of the .Net framework at your disposal, while Silverlight only has a smaller sub-set (not really subset but I guess you could say that). Which means the client will only need to have .Net framework installed.
As for the server the client can connect to, it could be anything but it really depends on what you do with it. If you want to serve generic files or standard web services, yes, any web server can do that. It's up to the client (WPF application) to interpret the data it receives from the server.
You will be generally restricted to Windows OS's when using WPF, see the other answers.
However, WPF browser applications (BAPs) are not really that great a technology (might have matured a bit more since last I looked at it though, which was a fair time ago); if the user must install it on his computer then why bother putting it in a browser at all? Deploy it via click-once or something.