Media Center SDK 5.3 - XBAP is no longer supported
There are few new features and tools such as better tools and documentation for animations, and new Visual studio 2008 templates. However the big news to my opinion is that SDK 5.3 made XBAP hosting deprecated. I tried to find why? And what does it mean?
In the documentations, they delete anything regarding WPF (for example they now compare only two technology choices - HTML & MCML). In the template, there is no XBAP template. I wonder if old XBAP application still gets compiled with the new SDK.
There are only speculations about why they did that, such as they may want to put their effort in MCML, or they may work on hosting Silverlight, but nothing official.
Dropping support in XBAP is something really nasty to do to those companies that have developed their Media Center applications with WPF. For example the Yes MCE application is based on XBAP (Developed by Goome).
I hope that the current SDK at least support XBAP for backward compatibility, if you can call a less the one year old technology, a legacy!