As others have mentioned - thanks for this! I thought I understood CORS, but one thing I apparently wasn't clear on was the conditions on which a pre-flight request was made. Thanks for clarifying!
Totally agree with previous comments about WPF having a steep learning curve. We recently released our photo-tagging application called Tag That Photo. It's currently available for Windows and built on the WPF platform (Mac client coming in future). It detects & recognizes faces in user's local photo collections, allowing them to tag people, add keywords and location data to the images. All the data can be written back to the image metadata for import into other photo editing tools. Unlike many other face-recognition platforms out there, everything is executed locally so user's photos stay private.
Prior to creating Tag That Photo, we had little experience with the WPF beyond simple demo type applications. Of course we've come a long way over the course of development but it certainly hasn't been easy. We have extensive experience with many other UI frameworks such as WinForms, Android / iOS as well as various web frameworks, and I think it's safe to say that once you wrap your head around it, the WPF has the slickest architecture. The team that designed this really knew what they were doing. It has this "peeling-the-onion" mentality to it where it's simple to implement straight-forward use-cases but if you want lower-level control of essentially every aspect of rendering, binding, input handling etc it's all exposed for you.
We built a commercially viable product with the 2nd generation Kinect that calculates cubic dimensions of packages for the Transportation/Logistics industry. As others have already stated, the sensor capabilities at the price point offered are unbeatable.
For context: our device is capable of measuring the dimensions to a 5mm accuracy on cuboidal (box-shaped) objects sized between 60mm and 1200mm (approx 2.4" to 48")
The device has passed certification by some pretty rigid government bodies in North America that spent a significant amount of time evaluating it to ensure it measures correctly ALL the time.
Of course we always knew this day would come eventually, but it kinda sucks that it had to be today though. Time to buy up those surplus refurbs I suppose..