Udi: 3.0 is Meh

Udi thinks 3.0 isn't all that great. His response to my recent post is: 

"...The whole 3.0 story, I've got to tell you, I'm pretty underwhelmed. Everybody seems to be jumping up and down about WPF, and yes, it's new and shiny, but there still the clunkety Windows message pump in the background. No real changes in how you're going to write multi-threaded UIs, which seem to be the real future given the rise in multi-core processing. The visual aspects of client side code in the systems I write run at around 5% of the overall effort. So the UI will look better, I dunno, 4D buttons and stuff, sorry for not falling over with enthusiasm..." [1]

Just to be clear, I am talking about the customer side of things, not the dev. benefits. Generics are great and I think they should have been in 1.0, but they don't make a difference in the customer experience and certainly don't make a huge difference in the way software is built. Yeah, it gives me some auto-complete and saves me some casting or some collection code-gen, but I can still build great software almost as fast without them.

The value proposition of WPF isn't all that great if you are the person that owns your UI. If you, being a developer, do all of your design work and your UI code is really just 5% of your apps, then WPF probably isn't going to do you much good, because you obviously don't care enough about your UI anyway. (or maybe your apps really need to be 95% backend, which is fine, but that's certainly not the type of apps we are building). We create tools for instructional designers. Since our apps live or die based based off of their UI, building the UI certainly is a hell of a lot more than 5% of the total effort. The more you work with professional designers to help refine the look and feel of your desktop apps, the more you will see why products like Expression are really going to revolutionize the way software is built. Personally, I'd love for designers to be even more involved with our product design, but it's a lot harder to make that happen when Photoshop is the best tool for the job.

In any case, sounds like we disagree on the benefits of 3.0, but that's fine. If you'll at least grant me that 2.0 to 3.0 is as good as 1.0 to 2.0, I think my argument still stands. It makes sense to me that the 3.0 adoption is going to take off rate that quickly overtakes the 2.0 numbers, so why not just wait out another extra year or two on the 1.1 Framework and then move to 3.0? Then, I'm not risking the loss of sales for distributing 2.0 applications that people can't use because of security lock downs and I get to take advantage of WPF's "4D buttons and stuff" in the not too distant future.

[1] http://udidahan.weblogs.us/archives/036964.html