Okay Already

So there's obviously a lot of buzz around Silverlight from Microsoft. It's gotten people asking a lot of questions also within AOL. What's gonna happen to Boxely? How can it compete against Microsoft? Etc.

We don't know the answers to the questions yet, and we're looking into it. There's been a lot of positive and negative opinions on Microsoft's latest offering, so I've decided to check out WPF from the context of Boxely. I'll post my findings and guides to getting set up with WPF. So to the two of you who read this blog, watch this space :)

Some of you may be thinking, "Why WPF? Why not Silverlight?" Well, WPF is the desktop solution for applications (like Boxely), while Silverlight is targeted for the Web. (Silverlight is a subset of WPF, in case you didn't know). So the real question is how does Boxely hold up against WPF, not Silverlight. When we decide to release a "Boxely Web runtime", I'll take a look at Silverlight.

First things first. WPF needs .NET Framework 3.0. If you have Vista, stop now; it's already installed. But on XP, you need to download a 2.8MB installer. Oh no wait, I'm sorry, it's 26MB! That's right folks, don't be fooled by the size of the installer. That alone is just the piece that goes and fetches the actual components. Kinda made me wonder why the bootstrap installer is still 2.8MB. I suppose there's logic in there to pick and choose what components are really needed based on your system configuration, but whatever.