Full-Time WPF Development

Question

I am fortunate to be working for a company in which all of our new development efforts are all in WPF. Are there a lot of other developers out there in this situation? Are companies quickly adopting this as their primary UI platform? As developers we all see the value in it, but are companies buying into it?

Answer 1

I think the major problem for the companies to adapt this new technology are

• learning curve on XAML and new UI concepts
• Developers have to forget all the knowledge they got on Winforms(or equivalent UI) technologies, most people are reluctant to give up their expertise.
• The need for the new skill called "UX Integrators" who should be able to work with the new RIA tool called Expression Blend to style/integrate the design with the code.
• The need for new Framework requirement(.NET3.5) and the new set of tools make companies or clients think twice before they take this route. They usually think that this may be a 'risky' path.

My company is concentrating mainly on the Microsoft RIA technologies like WPF and Silverlight. And we are helping other companies to bootstrap their WPF development efforts by creating Proof of concept/Prototype applications to show the power/easiness of WPF.

Answer 2

I am doing WPF development at a major semi-conductor company. So far it has been a hit and miss experience. I was given pretty free reign to decide what development platform I used as long as we could support Windows Vista and later. Given that I had a pretty short development timeline for a rather large application and just two GUI developers to work on it, WPF seemed the right choice. HOwever as I got further along, some more warts of WPF manifested themselves... JUst look into "airspace" issues when integrating DirectX with .NET 3.0 implementation of WPF. Or look at the sorry state of the designer tools in Visual studio 2008. Still with these problems, they are relatively minor when compared to the development cost of creating a fully skinnable UI that supports RTL languages and animation. At one point someone (who worked at Microsoft no less) suggested that I look at SDL as an alternative to WPF. Yeah right.

Another problem that I have is that designers are still not doing uptake on the whole WPF/Blend tools. Most designers I know scoff at running anything other than Adobe tools on a Mac. It is up to us developers to translate their designs into workable code. I hate those turtlenecked d***ks.

Anyway, my company leaves the technology decisions to the people that are using it. So WPF was a natural choice given my requirements. I don't regret it but I wish it had been a bit more mature before they released it with Vista. There are some critical fixes that were put in .NET 3.5 that I need. HOwever, I don't want to force my users to download .NET 3.5 when .NET 3.0 is on their Vista system.

Answer 3

Our company is also doing most new development in WPF. It is working fairly well for us. However, it took 2-3 months for the organization to overcome the learning curve and to begin the "WPF Way of Thinking."

Similar to Louis' point, I think one of the reasons it is slow to take hold of the industry is that designers are hesitant to learn the Expression suite. Once there are an adequate number of Expression designers out there, I think companies will see more immediate benefit of using WPF.

One of the key benefits to WPF is the vector graphics. Because we develop apps that could be used on small laptops and rugged PCs, the ability of the UI to scale to different sizes of monitors is very beneficial.