WPF vs WinForms or Rich UI vs Stable Applications? What do you think about the future of the Windows Forms platform? [closed]

Answer 1

I have worked with WPF on a couple of applications (one LOB, one controller UI) and I find it is very elegant and a productive tool to use. The databinding and nested control element container model are very powerful.

It is very different from Winforms and has a big learning curve. Once you have made some progress along that learning curve, though, you will never go back to WinForms - at this point when I think of using WinForms I think, "ugh!"

Answer 2

I have used both WinForms and WPF and I will have to agree that WPF still needs a lot of work in order to become the UI platform of choice for LoB applications. Currently WPF is useful for creating UI with rich effects and animations, but even then there are problems.

Answer 3

Although the learning curve for WPF is a bit long I think people have started to take it under serious consideration for building new applications. But still we need a serious motivation for migrating from Winforms to WPF.

Answer 4

I guess you have to look at what WPF offers over Webforms. The only thing that comes to mind is more possibilities GUI wise, but that again make WPF a bit more complex. Most Webforms applications aren't made to look good, they are meant to perform certain operations in an easy and understanding way and there WPF doesn't really give you much over Webforms.

Maybe silverlight could give wpf a push. There are a lot of interesting possibilities with full screen siverlight apps(Photo apps, office apps, report apps...) and they would of course be easily ported to WPF apps.

Answer 5

Count the # of times VS.NET 2008 crashes on you during a day of WPF UI development and how many times it crashes on you during winforms development. (here it's almost impossible to do serious wpf development, it crashes alot even after sp1). Winforms also has a lot of mature controls. Sure it doesn't have the fancy shiny 3d stuff of wpf, but for LoB apps, you don't need these anyway. Add to that the blurry text issue of wpf, and you'll understand that wpf has a long way to go before it's mature enough to replace winforms.

Answer 6

My own opinion is that the adoption of WPF is pretty slow at the moment.