Is WPF a safe choice for my application?

Question

I'm maintaing a Windows Forms application which draws map data with overlays. I've been considering a move to WPF for the drawing layer, to take advantage of the graphics card rendering. In the last couple of weeks, however, I've started to have some doubts:

• The new release of Evernote uses WPF, and doesn't run on Nvidia Quadro cards.

• A WPF transitions demo from WindowsClient.net stopped rendering part-way through the animations on one of our test portables with Intel graphics (and yes, we had the latest Intel drivers).

• Stack Overflow questions like this.

With the current Windows Forms codebase I can expect the application to run identically at every installation. WPF is much more dependent on the quality of the graphics card drivers, and I don't have the testing resources for comprehensive coverage.

I'm particularly interested to hear from people who've delivered a WPF application outside their own company or to a mixed population of machines - did hardware and driver specific bugs cause you a significant support burden?

Answer 1

Our WPF application is running on Windows XP SP2 (minimum) and is ok apart from on some machines, if the application is running and the PC goes into screensave mode it blue screens and crashes the machine. This seems to be graphics card driver version related - some of our users run dual monitors.

We haven't cracked this issue yet.

Answer 2

WPF uses Direct3D for its rendering, falling over to software if necessary. My best guess is that some drivers say that they support something in hardware but really don't handle it properly, and that is when we see these incompatibility issues.

The answer to your question depends on how willing you are to have less compatibility with machines than your current codebase has. If you've ever visited support forums for PC games you see all sorts of threads about graphics problems. As most PC's are going to be more and more compatible with Vista/Win7 and therefore support D3D9/10, the issues should lessen. The real question is if the tradeoff for you is worth it.

My own experience deploying a WPF app, I had issues with the mediaelement not working the same on two very similar PC's. But the video subsystem is a different can of worms anyway. Otherwise it was fine but I wasn't doing anything special graphically, just standard xaml.

Answer 3

We are facing some issues with the drivers of a specific graphic card vendor. Blue screens, a diagonal pixel displacement and application crashes have been observed. It is possible, however, to turn off the Hardware Acceleration on a per-application basis. Sad but true, this is the current workaround.

As already stated, I hope that the VS2010 release will help to improve the stability. Perhaps one day we'll see lists of WPF related fixes in the release notes of graphic card drivers. Along with the latest fixes for the game engine XYZ.