Will WinForms be deprecated in favor of WPF?

Question

We're starting a new project and deciding to use Winforms or WPF.

I've read some of the other SO posts, and realize that WPF has some advantages in the data-binding and appearance areas, but also has a steep learning curve and fairly immature tools and controls.

We would like to better understand if Microsoft is planning on stopping new development of the WinForms technology and forcing all new development to eventually go to WPF, or if both technologies will be maintained and improved. (Or are they just going to wait and see how it goes before making up their mind?)

Currently, it seems like WPF is not necessarily the best way to go for LOB apps that don't need extra bells and whistles in the UI. However, it would be good to know if WPF is something we'll need to embrace sooner or later.

Answer 1

I think Winforms will continue to be maintained by Microsoft, but improved upon only in small ways. All of the hot new innovations will go to WPF. Winforms is in a similar position as Linq to SQL. Linq to SQL is a tight, compact, fast ORM that is awesome, but Microsoft is throwing its weight behind the Entity Framework.

Winforms is great for what it is, and what it is used for, which is small, tightly-wrapped applications. It still has many years of life left in it.

If you want an application that will (more) easily port between a web interface, a WPF interface, or a Silverlight (or even a Flex) interface, Winforms is probably not for you. These other interfaces use standards-based markup, and an architecture that lends itself better to enterprise development.

Answer 2

I wouldn't worry too much about long term support. WPF may be getting all the love lately, but there's too much WinForms code out there to abandon support. After all, even MFC is still getting updates with each Visual Studio release.

Answer 3

This is a really popular topic around here. Check out the many answers to these questions:

Is it better to use WPF over WinForms?

Migrating from WinForms to WPF… was it worth it?

When is Winforms the correct choice vs. WPF?

WPF, Winforms, or something else?

WPF versus Winforms

What are the benefits of using WPF over WinForms?

Answer 4

I went to a WPF preview camp in Redmond a couple of years ago, and I asked this same question to one of the folks working on Crossbow (WPF/WinForms interop). His response was that WinForms will be supported for the foreseeable future, but could make no guarantees.

Given that, I think you'll be OK basing your app on WinForms knowing that you'll have some level of support for the next version or two of .NET (e.g. 3-5 years).

I would personally bet closer to 10 years considering MSFTs continued support for Win32. You may not get boatloads of new features with each release, but you won't be dropped, either.

In any case, I would actually be more concerned with MSFT's shift from rich-client technologies to web-based technologies, but not enough to ignore opportunities to create compelling applications in either case.

Answer 5

I certainly wouldn't call WinForms dead... but I also wouldn't write a new project in it. I would write all new projects using WPF for a myriad of reasons. The biggest is that if you use WPF/XAML, your porting efforts to Silverlight will be much easier.

Answer 6

Microsoft's support policy for the .NET Framework and all classes within it is 5+5: 5 years of mainstream support after a release, and then 5 years of extended support is available, or a fee.

With the .NET 4.0 update, including all the WinForms stuff, being released in 2009, you will get 5 years of mainstream support, to 2014 for any WinForms app built on .NET 4.0.

It's likely whatever comes after .NET 4.0 will include WinForms, too, in which case the clock resets.

This 5+5 policy applies to all business-related infrastructure software: Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, .NET, and so on.

The point is, you won't have to worry about lack of support for WinForms.

But, the prior posters are correct - the advancements are going into WPF.

Answer 7

WinForms won't be deprecated until Win32 is ... which could be quite sometime!

(Remembering that WinForms is basically an abstraction over Win32)

WPF on the other hand has few direct dependencies on Win32 so could potentially form the basis of a "fresh start" UI layer on a future version of windows. At which point I would imagine Win32 (and thus WinForms) will be completely ditched and only available through virtualization. As I said this could be along way off :)

Answer 8

This is partially a reasoned argument, and partially a heart-felt rant....

WinForms is based on the user32/GDI technology that has existed since the dawn of modern Windows. It is not going to go anywhere, in all senses of the phrase: it won't get new features; it won't get support dropped.

Or maybe it yet will. The charting API in .NET 4.0 is new and written for GDI, not WPF.

In general, Microsoft has a history with new technologies that looks like the following:

1. Invent new API.
2. Innovate with that API for 2 or 3 product cycles.
3. Realize that continuing to innovate means making unreasonable concessions to backwards compatibility or having realizations that the technology didn't originally address.
4. Invent new API by wrapping or leaving the existing API around. The existing API doesn't disappear, but new stuff doesn't use it, either.

RDO -> DAO -> ADO -> ADO.NET -> LINQ to SQL -> Entity Framework, toss in some ODBC ... there is a treasure trove of "dead" and wrapped technologies that are still usable and still exist today. These are data access technologies, but the same idea applies; UI frameworks last a little longer because they are the most visible areas of applications.

If I put my Nostradomus hat on, I can safely say that when .NET, oh, 6.0 is out in 2015--which sounds far away but is as close as we are to 2003--WPF will be as "dead" as Windows Forms because some other nifty managed interface will have been created that smoothes over all of the as-yet-undiscovered mistakes and inconveniences of WPF. Who cares? Everything we are yabbering about today will be deprecated by then. (Something is going to have to give in .NET 5.0 anyway because the framework is getting comically large.)

If anything, the thing that Windows Forms has going for it is that it's based on the technology that has existed for well over a decade, and that inertia is not dying anytime soon: the browser you are typing in is using GDI, the taskbar is using GDI, your instant messaging application is using GDI, the new Ribbon control in Windows 7 is using GDI, the $60 printer sitting your desk is using a GDI printer driver, the Windows CE applications running on your phone run a port of Windows Forms and GDI, the new Event Viewer in Windows Vista is using Windows Forms, and there is a large third-party component community behind the Windows Forms platform--WPF is a very small, niche product that only exists in the managed world, which is itself smaller than its unmanaged counterpart.

To this end, I feel that all of these "WinForms vs. WPF" discussions are blowing things out of proportion; the technologies are not mutually exclusive or inferior/superior, as much as Microsoft marketing might have us believe, and Microsoft's developers are smart enough to realize this. They are simply different and one of them happens to be older. If we didn't consider this periodically, we would have all listened to Gartner in 2005 and stopped building Windows applications entirely and moved everything to AJAX on the Web ... with our SOA interfaces ... that expose an alternative REST interface ... that use a TDD DDD model on that backend ... abstracted from the database by an ORM.

Being so eager to abandon a technology for fear of its deprecation only assures our clients that we will maintain a constant level of inexperience and incompetence at programming software solutions.

WPF is part of the future, to be sure, but it's not THE future. Personally, I'm on the fence to see if WPF "makes it" in the UI technology sense that previous data access technologies haven't, although Visual Studio adopting it in 2010 is a pretty comforting sign that Microsoft is actually serious about it by dogfooding it in a flagship product.

To sum up: if you are building a LOB application, I wouldn't feel guilty about using WinForms. If you need an advanced layout scenario, WPF interop is always available to you, just as one enhances a regular Web site occasionally with a Flash object. But for anything else, you owe it to your client to come up with a Good Reason for transitioning the whole team and shell to WPF; Windows Forms has its problems, but half the battle with any platform is knowing what the problems and limitations are, and most of the world (including Microsoft) is still learning WPF.