Is WinFX(Windows Presentation Foundation)Express Applications the answer to Application Publishing?

I started reading the following article from the new WinFX Developers site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/default.aspx 

 

The article entitled "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Windows Presentation Foundation Beta 1 Release" had a paragraph in it that made me sit up in my chair...I haven't read this thought process from MS anywhere else before(note the use of the word seamlessly):

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"Introducing "Express" Applications

One of the biggest challenges today with building client applications is the infrastructure issues of deploying and managing applications. In both business and consumer scenarios, application developers are looking for a platform that makes it easier to deploy applications to the desktop and to upgrade them seamlessly. The uptake of Web-based applications has been to a great extent due to these benefits, but people are increasingly also looking for applications that more fully exploit the speed and interactivity of the local PC. For example, AJAX applications have attracted attention lately, but the difficulty in building and debugging such applications leaves developers continuing to search for a better solution.

Enter the "Express" Application, a model that builds on top of ClickOnce (introduced with Visual Studio 2005) and provides a safe security model for applications deployed to a local cache that offers much of the power of the Windows Presentation Foundation combined with a lightweight path for maintenance and upgrade of an application.

Express applications run in a security-constrained sandbox and are hosted in the browser, running in the Internet zone. They deploy silently to a machine without an interactive security prompt and are locally cached. This is in contrast to regular trusted applications that typically have full access to the machine, run outside a browser window, and are installed into a \Program Files directory rather than being cached.

Application designers should select the optimum model for their needs based on the depth of their integration with the underlying platform. Applications that need to take full advantage of the client system such as large storage, start menu presence, offline capability, and so on should be full-trust applications. An application where a more Web-like experience is desired may be a good candidate for the Express application model (for example, visualizations, data-driven apps, and interactivity where the data comes from the server). The following flowchart highlights the major model choices."
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That is some pretty interesting stuff. The last paragrah still sums it up..not all applications are going to be a good candidate for this.  So you'll still need a full blown PC for these apps.

However it is this paragraph from above that the Thin Computing industry needs to start to take notice of:
"Express applications run in a security-constrained sandbox and are hosted in the browser, running in the Internet zone. They deploy silently to a machine without an interactive security prompt and are locally cached. This is in contrast to regular trusted applications that typically have full access to the machine, run outside a browser window, and are installed into a \Program Files directory rather than being cached. "

Sounds sort of like what Softricity is doing only in a browser..right?

I am not sure what sort of "FM"  that Microsoft is doing here to accomplish this but if I was a programmer I certainly would be jumping on the bandwagon here as it certainly gets us closer to the panacea of the virtual desktop,  I spoke about in an earlier post. What a great time to be alive.  

~Jim~