WPF - new idea of develop asp.net app?

I am a开发者_JAVA技巧 student and in last semester i develop asp.net application - "Payment Helper for School" . In this new semester i will have subject "Graduation Project" and i thinking about develop my application. In my old app i use:

• ASP.NET web forms
• mssql 2008 database
• linq to query to db

I achieved technologies above at good level and i want learn another one - WPF and XML cause i see that employers demand these and to create "cheaper" data layer ;)

I think to use in new version:

• WPF forms instead of ASP.NET
• XML (XSLT etc) instead of MSSQL
• i stay in linq to XML

Do You think that this is good develop of my app? I am now learning WPF from tutorials, but i want to learn it at practice. I think also about NHibernate which interesting me, but it is too much :/

What advice you can give me at developing app rely on WPF and XML db ?

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Doing this would move your application from web based to windows based. Think of WPF as winforms.

If you want to keep this application web based, you could look at silverlight, its a subset of WPF.

I wouldnt change your storage layer from SQL to XML if the app is data driven. Otherwise your going to have to handle concurrency, file locking etc which SQL server does for you by default (row locking etc) Ie, if there is lots of writing / updating of data SQL server is a much cleaner option than XML. In this context, think of XML more of a language independent way of passing data around, and storing simple data structures that are primarily read only.

If this is a graduation project, perhaps focus instead on design methodologies, MVC, or MVVM if you do choose Silverlight. A plus for potential employers and plenty of depth for a dissertation.

Edit - id argue XML would be a more expensive data layer! For the reasons above its going to be more complex and therefore greater dev time. Additioanlly SQL server express is free and the advanced edition with full text search and SSRS is also free; we have loads of clients that use it.

Edit 2 - another option would be to use Flex. It would be a completely independent tech on the presentation layer (and from a Uni point of view this could be good as you may loose marks / not even be allowed to use stuff from a previous project) Then you could use a combo of XML and JSON to pass data between the Flex layer and .NET on the server. Just another thought for you!