Porting WPF to Windows Phone 7 Silverlight
One year ago or so I released a media player developed in Java Swing. And for over one freaking year I've been sitting on my ass waiting for Sun to put the media component JMC into the JRE. And this has never happened. So what to do ? Do I use JavaFX instead ? No, because those people are busy ignoring real problems like library dependencies, CPU/memory usage and overall user experience.
So I test out Nokia Qt and Microsoft WPF and create media players using both frameworks. And then I do some testing and realize that Qt has problems with Phonon plug-in compatibility on 64bit Windows 7 and that WPF is slower to start up than a Java Swing application. And then Windows Phone 7 comes along and I start porting my WPF and Silverlight code to that.
And then I get this error: {"2011 An error has occurred. [Line: 82 Position: 127]"}
Which is a XamlException in the Application.LoadComponent call. When you read the position of the problem you realize that Silverlight wants all text wrapped in TextBlock elements, but this error simply silently fails in Microsoft development tools. Because it's valid in WPF, but not in Silverlight. You must also use Grid instead of DockPanel when you port from WPF to Silverlight. Maybe I'm stupid, but I really miss DockPanel. And how do I scale down visuals in a pretty manner anyway ? Do I really need Expression Blend just as an Adobe Illustrator SVG converter ?
Anyway. If you want JavaFX, try out Nokia Qt 4.7 QML. If you're a Microsoft dude, then Silverlight might be your thing. Coming from Java the whole new Microsoft UI stack feels very version dependent, like total vendor lock-in and almost a little fragile. And Nokia Qt crushes WPF on start up time.
Sun has pissed off every single Swing developer in the universe through endless procrastination and disconnected evangelism. Who cares about JavaFX syntax when you can't legally store your entire application on a DVD ? The JavaFX team is a like a small startup company in stealth mode. Except all the in-house lawyers and business people are working on something completely different.