Cross platform apps with WPF

Question

Hi,

I'm thinking of developing a desktop app in C#. Although windows will be my main target, later I'll try and run the app in MacOS X and linux. Can I do this today, in a simple way? I'm aware of the mono project, but it is not clear to me if I can do this in a simple way.

Also, what is the relation between WPF and Silverlight? AFAIK Silverlight follows a plugin model much like Flash or Java. Can I develop my desktop app with Silverlight and deploy it on windows, linux and os x without much changes?

Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

WPF is used to build desktop applications for Windows only. Currently no other platforms are supported. If cross-platform support is a must, you can create a browser-based application and use Silverlight. Silverlight runs applications in the browser, though, so you cannot make a "desktop" application using that.

Answer 2

The Mono project does not support .Net 3 and WPF yet, and it will probably been some time before that happens.

Silverlight might be sufficient for your needs. As of Silverlight 3.0 you can run Silverlight outside the browser, even create a shortcut to it on the desktop.

Answer 3

Mono is working hard to make sure that Silverlight runs cross platform (as mentioned on one of the stack overflow podcasts). So that seems to be a good way to go.

Answer 4

Last I heard, the Mono project has no plans to implement WPF, however they are working on other .NET 3.5 features, especially LINQ and ASP.NET MVC. The problem with implementing WPF in Mono (beyond the size and complexity of the API) is that on Windows it uses DirectX for rendering, so an implementation for Mono would need to use OpenGL. Definitely not a trivial undertaking.