WPF/E is Microsoft’s newly introduced technology meant to compete with Adobe’s Flash .  The community preview for WPF/E was released in February. In a bold statement, Microsoft released plugins for IE6, IE7, FireFox, and Macintosh’s Safari.  Is this yet another latecomer technology offering that won’t quite catch on?  I don’t think so.

When marketing or business people seek out software developers to solve a problem, geeks seldom consider Flash a genuine tool to solve the problem.  Business people may get the idea to use Flash themselves, and in that case they seek out a different kind of person to solve their problem.  Flash is most commonly wielded by people who have “Designer”, “Artist”, “Media”, or “Creative” in their titles and everyone recognizes this.

Why are there are so few “serious” business software solutions implemented in Flash?  Simple: The development environment is geared toward non-coders.  Creating a Flash animation is not unlike editing video or audio tracks with a little scripting available as an aside.  It is an amazingly effective environment for creating animations, media presentations, and simple branching logic. But, additions like ActionScript simply wring the last usable life out of Flash as an environment for application development.

Attempts have been made to marry the worlds of Flash and “real” development languages, with good technical success but little adoption. NeoSwiff creates SWF files from C# programs and received good play in the blogosphere, but is this a ubiquitous tool in our development toolbox?  Hardly.  It isn’t part of the platform, after all.

Microsoft has taken the opposite approach by centering the technology around structured language. In version 1, developers will be able to script WPF/E with standard JavaScript, an improvement over ActionScript.  A mini CLR will baked in to version 2, making WPF/E a genuine software development platform. This is the Flash killer part, by the way.

Including a security conscience CLR will allow support for more stodgy traditional programmers (like me) as well as the creative folks who will flock to the new development tools that will appear.  IDEs will undoubtedly appear for all classes of users including the creative types.  It won’t be hard to improve upon Flash MX, after all.

That is why WPF/E will kill Flash.  Because enterprise and SaaS developers will be using to solve real business problems and as long as it is available, it will become a ubiquitous tool for the animators, mini game makers, and Jib Jabs out there.

Had Microsoft introduced WPF/E 2 years ago, we may not have had to endure the last year of AJAX.

David Starr