Folks, FYI -- I have terrible news (as far as I'm concerned!). I downloaded the early alpha VS templates for OpenSilver and composed some simple screens in XAML. I was all excited because I got the impression from the samples that OpenSilver had it's own rendering engine like Silverlight (and Java applets and Flash) and I expected to see one <object> of some type embedded in the page which did all the work, or some similar technique.
I was suspicious when a template generated sample solution contained a .NET Standard 2.0 MVC host project full of CSS and JS files. I put in a StackPanel with some TextBlocks inside and hit run. It works and I see what I expected, but when I hit F12 to inspect the source I see a tangle of incomprehensible HTML that the gods themselves couldn't read. So it turns out that OpenSilver is just another fancy compiler that generates goddamn HTML and script for the UI. This is NOT a Silverlight-like replacement, it's an optical illusion of Silverlight created by HTML and JavaScript. Now we have Blazor and OpenSilver on the way to help us create rich business web apps by using compiled Wasm to manipulate the DOM. For anyone like me who is experienced with Silverlight, WPF and XAML, perhaps it's best to just hold your nose and ignore the ugly way it works and enjoy being able to write screens using familiar techniques. The end justifies the means. They reckon you can just paste your Silverlight code and XAML into an OpenSilver project, but that is unlikely to work with a typical large SL app like I'm supporting. If anyone else is trying OpenSilver, let me know how you go. *Greg K*
