Is this the beginning of the end for WPF?

Microsoft yesterday announced a new product, called LightSwitch, which is a new Visual Studio-based IDE to rapidly develop applications. You can see a very impressive demonstration here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/Jay-Schmelzer-Introducing-Visual-Studio-LightSwitch/

Looks like there's some very nice controls (for handling phone numbers etc.) in there, hopefully they will be made available outside of that product.

What is particularly interesting about this is that they are producing a Windows application, which is not using WPF. They have chosen to use Silverlight  running out of browser. This is bad for WPF, because that is what you would expect to be used on the Windows platform.  It suggests that over time WPF will be replaced by Silverlight, even on Windows.

So why have they chosen Silverlight? I guess there is some advantages in allowing organizations to be able  run the application on the web.  Hopefully, the reason for that decision will become clearer over time.

What I would've done is built the two desktop targets using WPF. However, what the Microsoft development team would've found is that it's almost impossible to share xaml code between WPF and Silverlight, so they would quickly given up and gone the Silverlight only route.

Hopefully Microsoft can improve the developer experience when single sourcing WPF and Silverlight, but there's still a long way to go.

….Stefan