Choosing technology for Windows development

I feel that the one thing that has been lacking here at Build is information about the fact that “old” windows application technologies are still there in Windows 8, and are just as much first class citizens as the new Metro style apps. They even have a lot on offer that the new apps don’t.

Microsoft promises that any application that runs on Windows 7 will also run on Windows 8. They are also saying, repeatedly but not loud enough, that the “old” technologies are still a very viable option for developing apps. You should not necessarily default to building a Metro style app when creating a new application. To be honest, in my world at least, I am very likely to lean towards another technology when starting a new project.

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Serving up Silverlight without IIS/webserver

In my previous post, I showed how to host WCF services. In the kiosk application that I am working on, I have, as previously mentioned, decided to not have IIS run locally on the machine. I have also decided host the Silverlight application locally. I do not want it to be fetched from the server for different reasons. So how can I serve up a Silverlight application without a webserver? Well…I am already hosting WCF services in a windows application…why not let the windows application serve up the Silverlight application as well?

WCF actually gives us this possibility very easily, and here is how it is done. I’m going to re-use the application from the previous post, so if you haven’t read it, I recommend doing so…

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