When creating a new GUI, is WPF the preferred choi

Question

Most restrictions and tricks with windows forms are common to most programmers. But since .NET 3.0 there is also WPF available, the Windows Presentation Foundation. It is said that you can make "sexy applications" more easy with it and with .NET 3.5 SP1 it got a good speed boost on execution.

But on the other side a lot of things are working different with WPF. I will not say it is more difficult but you have to learn "everything" from scratch.

My question: Is it worth to spend this extra time when you have to create a new GUI and there is no time pressure for the project?

Answer 1

As a side bonus, Silverlight is based on WPF and starting with either lets you gain the know how for working with the other. If things continue to go web based, having prior knowledge (and a library of existing code) to transfer easily to the browser (or Windows Live Mesh) might help give your software an extra lease of life.

Answer 2

I don't agree with some of the answers here. WPF is really well suited for line of business (LOB) applications. (The frog design LOB client is the best example). And besides all the possibilities to have your UI be eye candy (which is not necessary in business applications), WPF offers a lot more for you.

The data binding and templating features are just superior to Windows Forms. It also offers a far better way for separating code and presentation. We've successfully used WPF for 2 LOB applications in teams with no more than 2-3 developers.

The biggest problem you will face is probably the steep learning curve of WPF (compared to Windows Forms) which will decrease development speed with developers not used to WPF.

Answer 3

As others have said, there are advantages and disadvantages either way you go here. The advantages of WPF, as others have said, include:

• The ability to make very rich UIs relatively easily.
• Easier animation and special effects
• Inherent scalability (use the Windows Vista magnifier tool on a WPF application, and on a Windows Forms application: Note that in the WPF application, all the vector art scales beautifully)
• (OPINION ALERT) I feel it's "easier" to do document-oriented systems in WPF

However, there are drawbacks to WPF, where Windows Forms comes out on top:

• WPF's in-box control suite is far more limited than that of Windows Forms.
• There's greater support in the third-party control space for Windows Forms. (That's changing, of course, but think about it: Windows Forms has been around since 2001; WPF just a few years. By advantage of time, Windows Forms has greater support in the community.)
• Most developers already know Windows Forms; WPF provides a new learning curve

Finally, bear in mind that you can create great, attractive and engaging UIs in either tool, if you do the work (or use the right third-party tools). At the end of the day, neither is necessarily better in all circumstances. Use what feels right for the project.

Answer 4

The advantages of WPF is that it is much easier to create nice looking GUI's with custom controls and animations. WPF also helps further serparate the presentation and logic layers. If you have designers, it allows you to farm of 95% of this work to non-coders and allows the coders to work on logic. The disadvantages are the software costs for Expressions Blend, and the lack of any of the Visual Studio code profiling tools working well as they tend to get caught up in the frameworks calls in trying to render XAML. I am sure there are others but these were the only two we really saw.

The main consideration is if you wish to require your customers to have to install .NET 3.0 or even better .NET 3.5 SP1. You will get some niegative feedback

Answer 5

There is a very steep learning curve to WPF, and I recommend you get the obvious books first (Adam Nathan, Sells/Griffiths, and Chris Anderson) and blogs (Josh Smith, etc.). Just be prepared for it, and make sure your project allows you the time to learn WPF.

In addition to learning the technology, spend some time learning the patterns used to construct WPF applications. Model View ViewModel (MVVM) seems to be the one that has gained a great deal of acceptance.

Personally, I think WPF is worth it but be forewarned. Also note that you effectively restrict your users to Windows XP SP2+ and Windows Vista. We've made that decision, but you may have some different requirements.

Answer 6

Aside from the flexibility in UI design, there are some technical advantages to WPF:

1.) WPF doesn't rely on GDI objects. Well, I think it uses 2 GDI objects for the instance of the window itself, but that's practically nothing. I've been involved to a certain extent in a very large internal Windows Forms application. The people in our office sometimes run 3 or 4 instances of it simultaneously. The problem is that they frequently run into the 10,000 GDI object limit inherent to Windows 2000, XP and Vista. When that happens the entire OS becomes unresponsive and you'll start to see visual artifacts. The only way to clear it up is to close applications down.

2.) WPF utilizes the GPU. The ability for WPF to off-load some of the UI processing to the GPU is brilliant. I only expect this aspect of it to get better with time. As a former OpenGL programming hobbyist I can appreciate the power that comes from the GPU. I mean, my $100 video card has 112 cores running at 1.5 GHz each (and that's not top of the line by any means). That kind of parallel processing power can put any quad-core CPU to shame.

However, WPF is still pretty new. It won't run on Windows 2000. And in fact, a WPF application can be slow to start up after a fresh reboot. I talk about all of this on my blog: http://blog.bucketsoft.com/2009/05/wpf-is-like-fat-super-hero.html