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How many of these mission critical business systems are written with WPF or Silverlight for the native front-end? I don't know the numbers, but my guess is that the bulk would still be Winforms.

I think a lot of people who develop desktop front ends for .NET (and want to develop on new projects) would have put effort into learning Silverlight and/or WPF and are afraid that the effort is going to be wasted, as they need to learn another technology.

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What exactly does learning Silverlight entail that differs from learning any other .NET environment? XAML is just an xml markup. I only used it on a WP7 app and it took me a couple of hours to get the gist of how it works.

Not much really, especially if you limit the XAML to basic layouts. If you do everything in C#, it's not too much different from something like, say, WinForms. Which is why people like it.

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