I’ve been having a blast experimenting with the latest WPF/e CTP a little and I can see where there’s plenty of opportunity for “light-weight” interactive browser-based apps built on this technology. The best part about WPF/e is that the apps you create with it can run on the Mac as well as within Windows (Firefox and IE supported). That’s a big win.
As a Tablet/UMPC developer I have noticed a couple things in WPF/e that I hope will become addressed as WPF/e becomes more finallized.
First, most of the sample apps and what I’ve seen online use fixed sizes and positing of user interface elements. With all the potential devices with their different screen resolutions that these WPF/e apps might be running on, I don’t think this is a good trend to start with. Many of the apps don’t scale well on a UMPC, for instance. Maybe the WPF/e team needs to work on more Tablets 🙂
Second, it’s too bad there’s no direct support for ink in this early build. All is not lost, though. You can create your own ink Paths quite nicely out of line segments and even smooth Bezeir curves. I’m guessing we’re going to see more and more WPF/e apps like this one that have ink-like effects. Who knows, maybe someone will come up with an ArtRage-like painting app that lets you paint over Flickr photos….hint, hint. Unfortunately, there’s no pressure sensitivity out of the gate either. (Also, it seems that on at least the systems I’ve tried, that the mouse works better for drawing than the stylus–seems like there’s room for improvement here at the Windows system level.)
Finally–and this bit of feedback has nothing to do with being a Tablet developer–I’d like to see more code snippets in the MSDN documentation for WPF/e. A function reference is great. So are the white papers. However, at least one code snippet per function goes a long way to get the point across. Someday I imagine the documentation will include lots of live WPF/e samples too.