[mapguide-users] Silverlight/Moonlight Viewer

[Jason Birch]

I've heard a few rumours that the DWF viewer will deprecated in future
releases.  A Silverlight-based viewer would be a great replacement for
this... 

What kind of effort would be required to then bundle that as a WPF
desktop API/viewer (still bound by HTTP, or optionally direct server
connection over a LAN)?

I guess you could probably even repackage MapGuide + Maestro + this
control as a desktop GIS SDK, though I'm not sure that the whole
repository thing makes sense on a desktop level, and any kind of
commercial redistribution would kick in the whole DBXML dual license
thing.

As an aside, I don't think that the goal should be to create a duplicate
of the DWF viewer; something more modular/configurable would be nice.
You can do some really awesome stuff with Silverlight...

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Skovhede, GEOGRAF A/S
Subject: Re: [mapguide-users] Silverlight/Moonlight Viewer

Yes, the ActiveX viewer format is called DWF, and it is a format 
Microsoft intends to support
in the next version of Windows (called XPS I think?). Unfortunately, to 
use it would require some
form of deployment to the client machine, until it is standard on all 
machines.

With Silverlight, this poses problems, as it runs in a sandbox, and thus

cannot access or install
the required component. It might be possible to develop a completely 
managed DWF library,
and that would work, but that would require some heavy work.

And yes, you are spot on with your observations on tradeoffs :).