We’re starting a new project and are trying to decide to use either Windows Forms or WPF.
I’ve read some of the other Stack Overflow 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 Windows Forms 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 line of business applications 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.
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:
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.