We are currently designing a business application that has two primary requirements for it’s UI:
1) run on the Desktop (WPF) for enterprise users to provide a rich user interface, interoperate with other applications, access the filesystem, work offline, work with special local hardware, etc.
2) run on ASP.NET/Ajax to provide several components of this application to customers (internet). Unfortunately Silverlight is not (yet) an option.
Even though we don’t have to make the full application available on the web, some of these components are fairly complex and we would like to share as much UI code as possible with the WPF implementation.
What options do we have to reach this goal? Is there a pattern that works well with both technologies?
Update:
Thanks for the answers even though they don’t include the one I was looking for! 🙂
I don’t think UI generators are a good option. Like Eduardo pointed out you will probably end up with problems in both worlds. I will check out Sculpture though.
I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while now, and I’ve yet to come up with a great answer. That being said, here are some of my thoughts:
If you used some variation of the various MVP/MVC/MVVM UI methodologies and you were very disciplined in this approach (i.e. not mixing presentation stuff with behavior stuff), you’d probably be farther down the road.
You might consider investigating the various DSL toolkits that have cropped up, the idea being to create a simple ‘language’ to describe your UI at a high level and generate a representation of that UI in WPF/ASPX.
Also, I ran across this recently. I have no idea how good it is. I’m planning to take a closer look when I get the chance.