[THIN] Re: WPF development for a Citrix Server environment
- From: "John A Vorchak" <jvorchak@xxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2007 12:12:14 -0500
Jeremy,
Although I can't point you to any published resources, I can comment a bit
on the use of WPF within a TS environment as I've been testing it for a
while now in the realm of XP Embedded over TS coming from Longhorn server
and from 2003 Server. I have not tested it with the ICA client at all.
Since you mention that the prototype is in Flash is without much animation
and that it does operate suitably in the environment I would probably say
immediately that moving to a XAML presentation layer within a WPF form will
probably be of little issue over TS/Citrix. The presentation tier will be
the biggest issue with deployment of an application such as this as the rest
of the logic actually operates very smoothly in a TS environment, I would
say - without any qualitative data - that it will works more efficiently
than 2.0 WinForms.
I think that there are going to be some fantastic speed improvements on the
handling of rendering when using 3.0 enabled clients and especially on Vista
clients. Using WPF Remoting will transition us from sending a stream of bits
from the server down to the client for an entire screen to directly sending
XAML markup code down to the client and relying on the LDDM scheduler on the
client to handle rendering for the application - definitely giving enabled
environments some really cool stuff and doing it quite fast.
So far, I haven't seen any situation where WPF has shown a dramatic decrease
in performance on a full screen TS session on 2003 Server load simulated
with 20 clients and 1 live client when using *simple* WPF Forms. The
problems start occurring when I have enabled the cool stuff in WPF - 3d,
animation, etc. - clients start having the same problem that flash apps have
now. That is what my real concern with WPF on a TS session is. Mostly it
becomes a problem of feature creep when those things are available - C-level
exec's and marketing people start seeing the applications that are out there
with the really cool 3d animated graphs and such that they want to utilize
those rich applications in their environment bringing about forgetting about
the TS environment implications. Then all of a sudden, we get into a
situation where the TS/Citrix environment looks bad because it can't support
all of the new cool stuff. Changing over to the latest and greatest release
versions of servers becomes a reality at that stage, hopefully it's staved
off long enough to allow them to budget it and short enough away to remember
the fact that you have lodged your concerns about the environment.
All in all, I would say that just as long as all of the stakeholders are
aware of the implications of the fact that when an application is not served
by the WPF Gateway that there could be a dramatic increase on server video
resources and that the developers go very conservative when looking at the
cool stuff with WPF you will have very good luck with WPF forms and no less
of a server impact than on .NET 2.0 forms.
Good luck
John Vorchak
jvorchak@xxxxxxxx
john@xxxxxxxxxxx
Independent Windows Embedded and .NET Application Development and Consulting
SBC SITES ONLY GOOGLE SEARCH: http://www.F1U.com
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