Should I use the WPF or SlimDX?

Question

Here's what I want to do: I want to draw geometric primitives and maybe some form of 3D graphs and charts. I also want to be able to freely move the camera around. I want to do all this in a WPF or Windows Forms Window or maybe even render to an image. And finally, I want to be able to achieve this in a fairly straightforward manner.
So, what do you think? Which framework would you recommend for this purpose? Which one is easier to use?

Answer 1

Given that they both use DirectX under the hood I would suggest having a look at some samples for each and see which feels more comfortable to program with.

Answer 2

Can I recommend asking this also on GameDev.net - the author of SlimDX is one of their forum moderators (or used to be).

I'd suggest SlimDX would involve less major changes to an application than WPF.

Answer 3

I think WPF is definitely easier to use and has a lot more documentation on how to do things. Depending on the amount of stuff are you displaying, performance may be an issue with WPF though. If that turns out to be the case, you can mix both technologies by piping SlimDX output through a D3DImage, hosted in a WPF application.

Answer 4

WPF satisfies your needs. While D3D enables you to do much more advanced things, it is lower level. D3D9 is easier than later versions but it will become legacy along with XP through time. D3D10/11 are much close to hardware thus are much harder to start with. Rewriting for each new version of D3D every few years is not funny for a simple business applications. Yes, the old version still runs if you don't update it, because MS will provide backward compatibility. But the API documentation will be gone when it becomes obsolete.