You have to love reporters. Or perhaps I just need to be more clear with them.

On the way out of the WPF/E session at MIX06 in Las Vegas last week, I was approached by a reporter, presumably because I had asked several questions of the presenter.

She wrote two stories: Here and here. The two quotes from me, according to those articles, are:

Developer Pete Brown said his enthusiasm for WPF/E dimmed when he heard the lengthy timeline for device support. "It's interesting as a Flash competitor but it won't have the penetration," said Brown, a lead systems architect for Reston, Va.-based Microsoft Gold partner Applied Information Sciences. "Without a greatly enhanced feature set, it's tough to make the case for it."

and

"Without a greatly enhanced feature set, it’s tough to make the case for it,” said Pete Brown, a lead systems architect for Reston, Va.-based Microsoft Gold partner Applied Information Sciences.

To clarify, my enthusiasm is not "dimmed". My actual quote was something like:

"WPF/E in the browser has real promise. However, the real excitement with WPF/E will come about when it supports devices like handhelds near the end of 2007. Folks tend to treat handheld app deployment differently from browsers, as almost everything on a handheld is a new install anyway. Right now, with the ubiquity of flash and the number of companies that specialize in it, it’s tough to make a case for WPF/E on the internet unless it has a greatly enhanced feature set vs. Flash and a good delivery vehicle, like an IE7 update. We’ll have to see what the landscape looks like when it is released."

While I do think that WPF/E will have a hill to climb to get the installed base of Flash, Microsoft has shown themselves capable of delivering on that in the past.

You can find my write-up on WPF/E here.