[Solved] Choosing between C#/XAML and JS/HTML for great UI performance

[Ben Hoyt]

As developers new to Windows 8, we're having a hard time choosing between C#/XAML and JS/HTML for our upcoming app development. Telerik's RadControls for Metro are available for both platforms, and from our basic tests of Telerik's controls we can't tell much difference in performance.

We're developing a fairly photo-heavy application, kind of a photo viewer, so UI performance and responsiveness is key for us. That's pushing us towards C#/XAML, because our hunch is that it's going to perform significantly better than JS/HTML, which has to go through what's basically IE10's rendering engine, whereas C#/XAML should be a little bit closer to the metal. Is that assumption correct? However, in our initial tests, samples in both platforms *seem* to perform about equally well. Does anyone have any performance data or anecdotal evidence to show that C#/XAML would be the better route given our photo-heavy application?

Note that we don't have much experience with either set of technologies (esp on Windows 8, which is very new), so we can't exactly "use what we know".

[Veli]

Hi Ben,

Our own performance tests also indicate that  the two technologies are very similar in terms of rendering performance. In fact, if rendering performance is all you need to take into consideration, there's really not much of a difference which technology you'll be using, in our view. On the other hand, if you need to do a lot of computation-heavy image manipulation, your technology of choice might be XAML/C#, mainly because of the set of convenient image manipulation APIs the .NET framework provides out of the box. 

I hope this helps.

Greetings,
Veli
the Telerik team

[Ben Hoyt]

Hi Veli -- thanks for that info, very helpful.