I love programming in WPF and .NET in general. It’s extremely powerful, flexible, and you can do cool stuff in it.
But I’m a little worried about whether it’s getting much traction. When I talk to other sw engineers people don’t seem to know much about it and the WPF sections on lots of online developer forums tend to get very light traffic.
2 years ago someone here (How popular is WPF as a technology?) posted a question about this, so I want to revisit this now in 2010.
Does WPF have legs? Is it really going to take off? Does it have major corporate adopters? Since I enjoy programming with it is it a good career move for the next few years?
Thanks in advance for any comments or opinions!
For what it’s worth, right now StackOverflow shows 9,000 WinForms tags and 15,000 WPF tags — hardly light traffic.
That could just mean people have more difficulty with it, but IMO the momentum has been shifting. I don’t personally know anyone starting new greenfield projects in WinForms anymore.
Are the engineers to whom you are talking already working in the .NET stack? If they don’t know about WPF it probably just means they work somewhere that is not creating new desktop applications. They could be maintaining existing applications or working in the web space, in which case they’d have little incentive outside of pure curiosity for exploring the current state of Windows Client technologies.
Also IMO, it is good from a career perspective, because it is so highly (and ever-increasingly) overlapped with Silverlight. Silverlight jobs are in demand and will only become moreso as companies target Windows Phone 7 and cross-platform applications that leverage existing .NET assets.