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The value of SciChart in Silverlight is the browser hosting capability. With Silveright on its way out, there appears to be no replacement for SciChart in a browser. However, there is a very good public domain project called Fayde that has re-implemented the Mono Moonlight code as Typescript. Fayde lets you port C#/XAML to Javascript surprisingly easily.
Have you looked at Fayde, and do you foresee a (possibly stripped-down) SciChart version for Fayde?
- asthomas asked 4 years ago
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Hey there,
This is a really cool technology, and I wasn’t aware it existed.
Without knowing too much about this, I must say, I would be very surprised if it could support SciChart. This is because we really really push XAML to its limits anyway. One tiny mismatch in implementation and the whole thing comes falling down.
What is more likely is we’ll end up porting to various platforms to enable web development. We’re already developing platform ports such as Android / iOS and we are continuing to develop WPF but moving away from Silverlight (it just doesn’t have the support from MS that WPF does).
I hope that answers your question. If you have any other ideas, let me know.
Best regards,
Andrew
- Andrew answered 4 years ago
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I guess the answer is “no”, you’re not going to consider Fayde. That’s a shame, as it’s the only WPF implementation that will run in a browser. Native apps in Android and iOS are not equivalent at all. They’re not web-launched and cannot be part of a larger web application.
I agree that you’re unlikely to get the performance in Javascript that you get in C#, but having worked with Fayde I can say that it’s good enough for lightweight applications. A lot of what you’ve accomplished with SciChart is algorithmic, and that would port. The challenge would be in the renderer, and frankly even a low-performance SciChart in a browser would be head and shoulders above anything else out there.
- asthomas answered 4 years ago
- I would be prepared to bet money that WriteableBitmap won’t work in Fayde. We make heavy use of that in SciChart – the entire chart is drawn to a bitmap using various algorithms and then the bitmap presented on the screen. It can be done (SciChart on the web) but it won’t be done with a cross-compiler
- Andrew is right. WriteableBitmap makes calls to NativeMethod, a class consisting of direct Windows API calls. In WPF these are handled by .NET Framework and in Silverlight the AGCore maps them to the appropriate substrate depending on the platform. Microsoft are really disappointing their loyal ISV’s and customers here. Great ISV’s like SciChart and customers like ourselves have invested heavily in SilverLight and Microsoft has closed the door on us.
- It is a shame indeed, Silverlight is a pretty awesome technology and I’ve written business apps in it that are still in use today. It’s not solely MS’s fault. Google Chrome blocks the silverlight plugin (and all plugins now). It does seem odd to me that when you have .NET running cross platform to can it but c’est la vie! As I said before WPF continues to be a strong platform for us and we see no change to continuing to support WPF. We are also working on other platforms (iOS/Android due out soon) and considering porting to web, with some cool client-server tricks up our sleeve to make it best in the world … ^_^ :)
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I don’t think it’s that easy to write off HTML-5’s canvas. This article talks about the transition from Silverlight to HTML-5 and specifically mentions WriteableBitmap.
http://www.wintellect.com/devcenter/jprosise/making-html5-come-alive-with-the-canvas-api
The reality is that you render with a pixel-pushing API that manipulates a bitmap, and that API could probably be perfectly reproduced in Typescript. I suspect the problem is one of speed, not reproducibility.
- asthomas answered 4 years ago
- Yeah it would work, but not using a cross-compiler IMO. Silverlight barely supports silverlight, I can’t imagine any cross-compiler perfectly supporting it either. The only way to have a web version of SciChart is to write it / port it by hand.
- I’m sure you’re right. I have not seen a cross-compiler that could handle a C# to Typescript translation. It would need to be a hand-ported effort. Having ported a substantial amount of code from Silverlight to Fayde I can tell you that it’s not as hard as you might think. Still, that boils down to a business decision as to whether you want to support two code bases.
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