Anyone using WPF for real LOB applications?

Question

Anyone using WPF for real LOB applications?

We have all seen the clever demos of WPF showing videos mapped onto 3D elements. These look great but what about the real wor

Answer 1

I feel the eye candy demos are targeted mostly towards designers. Having said that, there is a huge potential in improving usability of LOB apps using WPF. Check this article about the potential of Silverlight.

Line-of-business applications have a notorious reputation for being all business and no pleasure. The fact is that "user experience" has never really been a top concern when developing line-of-business (LOB) applications. While many LOB-style applications are putting an increasing emphasis on usability, they often fall short on appeal. User experience is actually a combination of both usability and appeal.

Answer 2

A friend of mine used WPF for some darn cool tree (as in tree-view) rendering where it did a little better than showing a simple sliding view. I might be able to talk him into putting it into the public domain or somedthing.

Answer 3

We have started using it in peripherals to the main application, sort of as a POC as well as a learning opportiunity.

It's looking OK, but we only have 1 graphic artist here who is overworked, and without him, WPF apps still look graphically like developer designed apps.

As well as us coders not being graphical, we're largely still building Forms apps in WPF rather than leveraging fully the power of WPF. I'm sure we could do wonders with more resources and more experience, and am looking forwards to doing so.

We are also considering using Silverlight to appease the boss's belief that there is nothing you can do in a forms app that can't be done on the web. It's a dangerous line though, as he might start believing he's right and we were all just complaining about nothing (actually, he already does :) )

Answer 4

Just rolling out a WPF LOB application to about 400 municipal locations. Not heavy on the eye-candy but very heavy on databinding.
WPF is custom made for LOB! Many drawbacks (ie no refactoring) were recently fixed in SP1, but tools are still, to put it mildly, retarded.
I find that ironic seeing that XAML was invented for easy tooling.
To use WPF, you really need to understand some fundamentals in the WPF object model, and I don't see the designer/developer workflow happening anytime soon.
There's a really steep learning curve, but it is worth it.
Tasks that used to be huge are trivial now, and conversely, tasks that used to be dead simple are near impossible.

Answer 5

While we discussing it, smart guys are building amazing apps:

Lawson Smart Office brings WPF goodness to the enterprise

IGT’s Next-Generation UI with WPF

Billy Hollis on Getting Smart with WPF

Answer 6

I worked on the Helios product in this setup. WPF on top of lots of other stuff, including C++.

WPF is what I would recommend if you were developing in .NET and wanted a smart client application with a heavily customized UI. If you were thinking about using a simple Windows-y UI, go with Windows Forms.