One project, one declarative language, two platforms - A side-by-side XAML project on Silverlight 5 and WinRT

Silverlight and other cool things … - A shimmering wall of sequin’s to compare WinRT XAML & Silverlight 5

"Let’s get a bit creative this week.

I have this vision in my head of a wall of glittering sequin’s, you know what a sequin is right?! like what was big in the ‘disco’ era, and still is big today ?!..

For this post I want to start out simple and create a basic shimmering wall of sequins , nothing too complex!

My ulterior motive for doing this is to compare , what I’m guessing will be, GPU/CPU intensive animations between Silverlight 5 & WinRT XAML.

SILVERLIGHT 5 Approach

Let’s first do this in Silverlight …

WinRT XAML Approach

Let’s now take the Silverlight app and port it to WinRT XAML …

Conclusion:

You can definitely achieve great results with Silverlight 5 if you take care with your visual tree and know how to optimize and use the provided tooling to debug/trace performance issues.

BUT WinRT definitely is showing signs of being an amazing GPU Accelerated framework that let’s you achieve levels of performance greater than anything Silverlight can offer today. And that’s not to say that Silverlight is bad, it’s all about using the right technology for the job.

If I were to build a client solution I would do this using an immediate mode approach, XNA or DirectX. Hopefully I’ll do just that in a future post

..."

I'm sure we'll be seeing more and more of these kinds of posts in the coming months/year, but I thought the depth and details in this one something of interest, especially the "Performance Tuning" sections...