From Winforms to WPF time?

Question

We are a team of .net winform and asp.net developers building custom enterprise applications for organisations mainly in the public sector. Is it time to retrain/retool the team in WPF/Silverlight? How to make management, in first place and clients second buy the idea?

Answer 1

Personally, I think that with VS 2010, WPF is finally mature enough to be the only option. Previously it was held back by performance issues, poor text rendering and a lack of out-of-the-box controls.

Here's what Rocky has to say, and I completely agree with him:

Silverlight and WPF both compete with Windows Forms. Poor Windows Forms is getting no love, no meaningful enhancements or new features. It is just there. At the same time, Silverlight gets a new release in less than 12 month cycles, and WPF gets all sorts of amazingly cool new features for Windows 7. You tell me whether Windows Forms is legacy. But whatever you decide, I’m surely spending zero cycles of my time on it

http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/ItIsOnly8HowCanItBeLegacy.aspx

Answer 2

Clients shouldn't care, necessarily. You'll convince clients by showing them how you can be more productive and succeed in their goals, not by explaining tech. to them.

Management, on the other hand, is trickier. You need to convince them of the arguments for using WPF or Silverlight vs. Windows Forms. This can include:

1. Easier maintainability, especially when designed properly
2. More flexibility
3. More options to gain a competitive edge, via using new techniques such as better graphics/etc
4. Better support/lifecycle, since the newer technologies are actively developed and improved by Microsoft
5. Better deployment options (particularly with Silverlight), allowing for more flexible deployment strategies

Answer 3

Before you go down that path, have a careful read of the Silverlight 4 news that is coming out of PDC. You will end up doing a mix of both Silverlight and WPF, it is unlikely that you will end up doing only one, and they are sufficiently alike that skills from one can be used in the other. However you don't want to be wasting money and time on Silverlight training that is out of date, as Silverlight 4 will be no more than 6 or 9 months away from being released (possibly sooner). Therefore you may want to do the WPF training first.

To add to what @Reed said:

• faster development cycle (once the developers are familiar with the technology)
• very easy to do automated testing, including automated UI testing

Answer 4

Is it possible for you to step towards WPF by embedding a WPF app into one of your existing WinForm applications?

It can be a lot harder to sell a complete retooling without an example of some of the benefits (in particular, maintainability and flexibility, especially in the UI). Try starting with a well used portion of your current application and giving a demo with it in WPF.