Hi, Dmitry.

>I wonder, how can it be? My understanding (I admit, very limited) that Silverlight carries .NET framework so that the application can run in a browser without having .NET installed. And I can't say that .NET is light. In fact the friend who inspired me to start this thread said that to develop WPF application, you need a very powerful box (minimum of 2Gb of RAM on Vista, in his words).

It's pure magic. :)

They managed to squeeze a good part of the .NET Framework and a subset (around 10%) of WPF in around 4 MB (in Silverlight 1.1). What it does not have, obviously is everything related to server-side stuff like ASP.NET. For the rest, you have generics, LINQ, threading, and much more. You can take a look at the Silverlight 1.1 poster here.

Requirements for Silverlight 1.1 Alpha (this may change a bit when Silverlight 2.0 Beta is released, probably at MIX in march) are:

Windows PC: Pentium III 450 MHz
Mac: PPC G3 500 MHz ó Core Duo 1.83 MHz
128 MB RAM
XP SP2, Vista, 2003 Server, Mac OS 10.4
IE 6, Firefox 1.5.0.8, Safari 2.0.4

I guess Silverlight 2.0 (1.1 will get -properly- renamed 2.0) will finally run on Windows 2000 also, which is still widely deployed in corporate environments, and will probably support Opera too.

Also, it will have built-in controls (like text, checks, buttons, lists, and basic grids), so it will be easier to build business apps.

Going back to the begining of the thread, both Winforms and WPF had its place. While WPF (not Silverlight) requires newer hardware and more memory (althoug it is generally faster at the proper conditions) Winforms is lighter and will run on older and smaller equipment.

Beside that, Winforms currently has better tooling and sophisticated controls for typical business apps and development is still faster.

Lastly, you don't need to discard neither. Both can interoperate, and there are some frameworks and third-party libraries that make that pretty easy, by providing ways to mix both event models and other stuff that is quite different in each platform.

Final comment: WPF (as told by many here) is HUGE. Many people found easier to learn XAML basics on (the smaller) Silverlight, and then WPF.

Regards,