WPF vs WinForms or Rich UI vs Stable Applications? What do you think about the future of the Windows Forms platform?

Question

WPF vs WinForms. What do you think about the future of the Windows Forms platform?

Answer 1

My own opinion is that the adoption of WPF is pretty slow at the moment.

Answer 2

Count the # of times VS.NET 2008 crashes on you during a day of WPF UI development and how many times it crashes on you during winforms development. (here it's almost impossible to do serious wpf development, it crashes alot even after sp1). Winforms also has a lot of mature controls. Sure it doesn't have the fancy shiny 3d stuff of wpf, but for LoB apps, you don't need these anyway. Add to that the blurry text issue of wpf, and you'll understand that wpf has a long way to go before it's mature enough to replace winforms.

Answer 3

I have to agree with both posts above. Further, until Microsoft starts really pushing WPF in its own products, it's not really going to take off. In my mind, Microsoft dogfooding WPF is what will lead them to really address the issues that are holding it back: the crashes, text issues, and lack of pre-built controls.

Answer 4

Although the learning curve for WPF is a bit long I think people have started to take it under serious consideration for building new applications. But still we need a serious motivation for migrating from Winforms to WPF.

Answer 5

Few links which may through some more insights on this topic :

Anyone using WPF for real LOB applications?

WPF for LoB Applications

WPF Composite Client

What is Differentiated UI? (and how it pertains to Composite WPF)

Answer 6

I guess you have to look at what WPF offers over Webforms. The only thing that comes to mind is more possibilities GUI wise, but that again make WPF a bit more complex. Most Webforms applications aren't made to look good, they are meant to perform certain operations in an easy and understanding way and there WPF doesn't really give you much over Webforms.

Maybe silverlight could give wpf a push. There are a lot of interesting possibilities with full screen siverlight apps(Photo apps, office apps, report apps...) and they would of course be easily ported to WPF apps.

Answer 7

I have used both WinForms and WPF and I will have to agree that WPF still needs a lot of work in order to become the UI platform of choice for LoB applications. Currently WPF is useful for creating UI with rich effects and animations, but even then there are problems.

Answer 8

I've seen MS's demo of a healthcare app using Silverlight and it is gorgeous. I would say that without a doubt it is the future as it builds upon the experiences of WinForm and restructures things to get around the problems of WinForm.

That said, at present WinForm is obviously more mature and probably has a shorter time to market due to the stability of the platform and wealth of resources, tools and knowledge.

I would expect that WinForm apps will slowly peter out within another decade but for now it is still a very viable platform.

Answer 9

Windows forms is Honda.

WPF is Orange County Chopper.

It costs more to build a custom hand made chopper, it takes a lot more skill for a worker to do all those components by hand, it requires artistic sense, dedication and allot of work, compared to a worker in a Honda factory that only presses 3 buttons and a bike comes out.

The result?

An Orange County Chopper is unique, beautiful, stands out of the crowd, and makes it's owner prowd, but it is also harder to manufacture, costs more, requires more talent on the builders side and not everyone can do it.

And the point of this rant is?

Use WPF if you want to stand out of the crowd and your clients can afford it ;-)

Answer 10

I am currently working with my third client to deploy develop a WPF application. The first was a LOB application for one of the 3 major shipping providers in the US, the other two for smaller companies.

I find Visual Studio to be perfectly stable, but I also never use the designer in Visual Studio. Expression Blend is perfectly stable, if not missing many features expected by designers.

WPF uptake is surely slower than language features introduced into Visual Studio & .Net, but it is far superior to WinForms in many ways and will be the future.

Go learn the WPF mindset and you'll never go back.

Answer 11

I gave up on WPF because the visual editor in VStudio 2008 is so unbelievably slow!

Answer 12

I think WPF is firmly targeted at a group of developers who are not inclined to adopt it. I don't believe WPF was made for CRUD apps. CRUD is much harder in WPF than WinForms. I have seen examples of databinding which I just don't like. You have to run through an intermediate technology (like CSLA) to make it work well.

No, I think WPF was designed for developers who want to ship super slick, super fancy media IDEs to the public. Unfortunately, this is precisely the group which is most stuck on C/C++ and most unreceptive to managed code. For this reason, you have to question Microsoft's market-thinking.

On the other hand, Microsoft eats its own dog food, and new flavors of puppy chow are often a response to strong internal presures for better stuff. You can see why the Windows Media group and the Zune group both would like and want WPF.

Answer 13

I have worked with WPF on a couple of applications (one LOB, one controller UI) and I find it is very elegant and a productive tool to use. The databinding and nested control element container model are very powerful.

It is very different from Winforms and has a big learning curve. Once you have made some progress along that learning curve, though, you will never go back to WinForms - at this point when I think of using WinForms I think, "ugh!"