I have had occasion recently to play with the latest (December 2006) CTP of WPF/e.  It's a really cool technology that I think is poised to change the way people write rich web apps.  It's cross-platform (Windows and MacOS at the moment) and cross-browser (IE5-7, Firefox, and Safari at the moment).

The CTP has some limitations at the moment that are keeping it from really being a replacement for HTML-based web apps (It's missing the WPF layout manager for one), but it certainly doesn't keep you from doing some really cool stuff with it.

Rather than just point you to the existing samples (scroll down to see them), I thought I'd put together one of my own.  I created a proof of concept replacement for my blog's header that shows my photos from Flickr as if they were hundreds of polaroids strewn about and panning by.  You'll need to go to the WPF/e site and download the plugin that's appropriate for your OS (look under Top Downloads on the right). After you've done that, click the image below to see the demo.

It consists of:

• A xaml file with the "background" (some of which is in the foreground) and some general declarative animation instructions.
• An html file with some script infrastructure for pulling JSON data from the Flickr APIs and turning them into visual elements.
• The provided WPF/e scripts for instantiating the control
• the MicrosoftAjax.js file from the AJAX library.
• A little .ashx proxy for routing the async calls to Flickr (to avoid cross-domain scripting issues)

If you watch long enough, it should scroll through all 7,140 of my pictures (with some gaps in between while loading new images), and then start over.

All in all, it was really easy to do.  There are some problems I need to address before it could realistically take over as the header for my blog, but I think it shows some real promise.  I can't wait for the actual WPF/e release.