Silverlight platform (WPF/E) emerged as a branch of Windows
Presentation Foundation platform. While WPF was essential to create
well-established user interfaces of desktop applications, Silverlight was
focused on Internet applications. A special feature of Silverlight technology
is that it can work under various operational systems and browsers. Also, work
of Silverlight application should not take a lot of system resources. So, a
specificity of Silverlight technology is the realization of a powerful user
interface based on the declarative markup for a wide variety of platforms with
full compatibility between them.
All these conditions create certain restrictions for
development and construction of the platform. First, the need to support
several platforms simultaneously increases the amount of works to develop a
platform and time spent on it. Secondly, Silverlight applications should
consume a few (not too many) system resources. For these reasons the
Silverlight functionality is less than WPF once from the beginning. Both
versions 1.0 and 1.1 of Silverlight were basically focused on creation media
applications. It was heavy to build any serious business solutions based on
these platforms. Silverlight 2.0 already contained a set of control elements
and tools for various business scenarios implementation. Nevertheless, until
that time there was no possibility to work with 3D- graphics within Silverlight
applications. Some tools which allow building user interfaces in a 3D mode have
appeared in Silverlight 3.
In this article we will consider 3D-possibilities of
Silverlight 3 for application programming. Approaches for building static
3D-projections and animations with 3D will be considered. Prototypes of user
interfaces for business applications with use of 3D transformations in
Silverlight will be also considered.