Advantage of WPF-application and Winform for business applications?

Question

I know asp.net and winform development. I'm not the type of developer who leaps into a new technology just because he is new. This should give me additional benefits, such as better performance.

What are the benefits of WPF over Winforms for clean business applications? I'm not interested in the extra eye candy, animation, gradients, image display effects, etc. that WPF provides. Business applications are designed for data entry, data presentation and, possibly, some graphs and static display of photographs.

How will WPF help with these applications? Better richer data binding? WinForm is a mature proven technology and I like the fact that I can do everything in Visual Studio and several IDEs for WPF (VS and Blend family). Plus, I think that WPF does not have such rich data binding elements as their Winform counterparts (DataGridView..etc). AFAIK, Microsoft will still support Winforms for many years.

Try to convince someone like me to switch.

Answer 1

I know asp.net and winform development. I'm not the type of developer who leaps into a new technology just because he is new. This should give me additional benefits, such as better performance.

For my team, WPF was much faster than WinForms for application development. We recently released a mid-sized app in 32 man-days. We had the advantage of an experienced WPF developer on the team and inexperienced guys who were eager to learn this technology. There was great morale and the performance was impressive.

WinForm is a mature proven technology and I like the fact that I can do everything in Visual Studio and several IDEs for WPF (VS and Blend family).

Do you consider yourself a hand-held encoder or drag-and-drop encoder? If you consider yourself a drag and drop tool, then the current cropping of WPF tools may not be suitable for you. Maybe wait for Visual Studio 2010? I work almost exclusively in XAML. Most WPFs will probably agree that this is the most efficient way to build WPF applications at this time. But then I also create my HTML manually, so it feels natural to me ...

What are the benefits of WPF over Winforms for clean business applications? I'm not interested in the extra eye candy, animation, gradients, image display effects, etc. that WPF provides.

I thought so, but recently I developed a business application with gradients, basic animations, and effects. These fancy features have been added to improve user experience. Why should business applications be Battleship Gray? Why should they be unusable? Of course, it is not the color, gradients, animations that make the business application usable, but using these effects can help the user, and this is what is important to me. I could do everything I did in a WPF application in WinForms - it would just take a lot more time.

Better richer data binding?

The databinding support is really awesome. This is my favorite feature on the platform. Check out this great Databinding cheat code .

Try to convince someone like me to switch.

I decided that I was not going to try to convince anyone else to switch to WPF. The developers I tried to “convince” (all experienced Winforms developers) tended to struggle with the platform. They are not invested in technology. They do not "receive." I encourage people to test the technology to make sure that it is suitable for them as a developer. The learning curve is huge. If you learn from books, check out this SO post for some mini-reviews of WPF books. If you find out by videos, check out windowsclient.net WPF video . If you find out, for example, view this or this . Forget everything you know about WinForms. WPF really seems closer to ASP than WinForms. Create some sample applications. See if this works for you and your team.

As you are layered (asp.net/winform skills), you can see the advantage of skilling-up in WPF, as it is very closely related to Silverlight. Silverlight fills this gap between your rich client applications and web applications.

I personally think that WPF is the best client-side technology available for the .NET platform and, as a rule, avoids development in WinForms for future work. Ymmv

Good luck with your decision.

Answer 2

I have a lot of winforms experience and have played a bit with WPF, but I'm selling.

Why?

• MUCH MORE. If you want to do something non-standard in winforms, pain and suffering arise, but in WPF it is simple.

• Much better to bind data

• It’s easier to develop (as soon as you understand the basic concepts, which, unfortunately, will take some time)

Answer 3

When I started looking at WPF, I looked at it as "Winforms with Vector Graphics" and ran right toward the training rock. The right way to move from WinForms to WPF is to take a heroic dose of any drug you can rely on to forget everything you know, and then start from scratch.

Seriously though - it's a lot cleaner and easier if you use a template like Model-View-ViewModel. Read more ... The Orbifold , this Google Group Theme and Channel9

Then at some point you will have insight and begin to tie everything. Your code-code will not be much larger than calling InitializeComponent ().

Answer 4

Thank you for message. My company has tons of time invested in WinForms. I can’t imagine how to get an average application in 32 man-days; our certification periods are the months and the end of the cycles, sometimes annually or longer (despite the fact that we adhere to the Agile development philosophy as flexible as possible), this is the nature of the applications we develop.

I was just playing WPF for the first time and found that I could get some of the benefits of WPF in WinForms using ElementHost. I expanded WPF TextBox and then wrapped my extended class in Win Forms UserControl and now has a WinForms application using this WPF text box, complete with spell checking support.

I am impressed that Microsoft thought about it (hosting WPF in WinForms and vice versa), since I really can’t see my company moving to WPF if we can’t move for a long period of time; WinForms has too many tools to start over. With my recent experience, I can start talking with some other developers about my recent experience and see what their thoughts are. I think WPF will take some time and this is similar to other comments.

Answer 5

Not exactly a duplicate, but you may find this post useful about the benefits of WPF besides the new graphics bits.

WPF or WinForms for internal tools?

Answer 6

Just check your search results right here at Stackoverflow to get numerous answers. https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=WPF+Winforms

Answer 7

Imagine if you can use the same interface (XAML) from the ASP.NET/(Silverlight) page with your desktop application. You only built it once, but plug it in either ... what is one of the intentions of WPF / XAML ... are we really there? Still not close.