I'd been thinking about this topic since I saw the new interface. Basically, after seeing the screen shots, I thought to myself that if the new Zune Windows client software was not written with WPF, Microsoft will have made a huge mistake by once again not backing one of their own technologies as a viable platform for developing a real world consumer application. Knowing the type of data this kind of app pushes around, the behavior in the v1.0 client today and looking at the new screen shot, that's an app that screams WPF.

So, yeah, I was going to just wait and see once I downloaded it, but I got curious and started to look around to see if there was an answer to the question already. Sure enough there is. Unfortunately though, it's not the one I wanted to hear. In this response to a forum thread about the new Zune client, Charlie Owen, Program Manager for Windows eHome (i.e. the Media Center team), states that it is instead based on the Media Center UI framework.

Let's step back for a second here. WPF has been pitched to us as a pillar of the next generation Windows experience since the announcement of the WinFX framework (later renamed .NET 3.0 *sigh*). For all intents and purposes it is by far one of the best frameworks I've ever seen for building rich client applications. Forgetting the flashing lights type stuff for a second, even just the layout and data binding engines alone make it one of the best platforms to work on. Yet when a group of Microsoft developers (remember they took the development in house this time around) sat down at a table and considered their choices for writing the next version of the Zune client they actually decided they'd rather use a variation (Charlie's words from the post) of the Media Center UI framework instead. Think about that... they didn't just use the Media Center framework, they actually made changes to it to suit their needs... and they did that rather than pick the fully baked platform of WPF.

End result so far as I can tell? Time wasted creating a proprietary framework. Opportunity to show the world that WPF rocks the house wasted. To bad. So sad. I hope someone out there can point out a positive aspect of this choice. I don't think being able to run the interface on Media Center extenders, assuming that was the main point of this, is a good enough explanation because you can write WPF based Media Centers today and, while they don't currently perform as well as a native MCML application, they perform well enough to cover what Zune would need to do AFAICT. Maybe the fact that Media Center forces WPF based apps into the Internet Sandbox is the problem? Why in heck they crippled them this way to begin with is beyond me, but if that were the issue wouldn't it have made more sense to invest in a joint project to lift that restriction for trusted/signed applications or something?