How stable is WPF?

Question

How stable is WPF, not in terms of the stability of the WPF program, but in terms of the "stability" of the API itself.

Let me explain:

Microsoft is notorious for using its entire methodology with new technology. As with the transition from silverlight 1 to silverlight 2. With WPF, I know that MS has changed a bunch of things with the release of the .NET package. I don’t know how much they changed. Thus, the bottom line, in your opinion, is going to update the system again with the next version, or you think that it is stable enough now that they will not change the main part of the system. I can’t wait to wean the material in each issue.

I hope the question was not too long.

Answer 1

MS does have a history of “fire and movement” regarding the introduction of new technologies into its development stack, but they also have a strong history of supporting support for old things and backward compatibility. It seems that WPF is getting material added to it with each new version of the framework, but everything you learn is not canceled or invalid.

The only violation I saw in my own WPF applications with the new version of the framework was recently in 3.5 SP1, and this was because we unknowingly relied on the error to get specific behavior from our code. We adjusted XAML to be more correct, and it started to work fine.

So, I think WPF is pretty “stable” as a client-side development technology.

Answer 2

We have been using WPF since its first release, and yes, from the very beginning it had problems that caused us headaches and made us scratch our heads to find work, but every new update to the stack actually became pretty stable.

It has definitely become easier and easier to develop with it with the addition of Expression Blend. Creating XAML in VS 2005 was not fun. The templating engine alone is enough to switch from WinForms, not to mention animation support.

In any case, I agree with Matt that he is pretty stable as a platform for developing client applications.

Answer 3

WPF is pretty stable as the changes go. Silverlight is still in motion. Although you can follow how silverlight introduced the concept of public manager (instead of implementing triggers), which can be adopted in wpf ...

If this happens, there will be several ways to define patterns of control and behavior ...

and it will be a headache.