XM Radio Player Part III : Choices

WPF, AJAX, or Silverlight RIA?
I gots more options than a block of Velveeta.
XBAP? XCOPY? XAP files are just ZIPs!
Let me run my bits on your silicon chips.

When I started to think of what my XM Radio Player would look like, I could only picture two things:

• Rectangles with rounded corners.
• Gradient color fills.

Given this detailed initial vision I knew I had to pick WPF.

What about Silverlight?

I considered Silverlight, but three factors kept me away. One issue would be the cross domain calls to the XM Radio domain. Although XM does put a crossdomain.xml file on their server, it only allows calls from *.xmradio.com, which meant I’d have to deploy a web service just to thunk calls over to XM, which isn’t hard, but added one additional piece of complexity. Secondly, I’ve been up to my ears in Silverlight a few times this year and wanted to try something new. Thirdly, it’s been some time since I’ve written a desktop app and I wanted to have some fun, and also take a look at Prism.